Video Creation Tools: Things to Know

If you’ve ever spent some time on YouTube looking for tutorials, you’ve probably come across quite a number of white-board videos. This usually involves some sort of hand manually drawing pictures. These are usually black and white.

These are very popular because although it is computer generated, the fact that there’s a hand drawing gives it some sort of manual look. There’s still that human component that people are drawn to.

Regardless, animated video using whiteboard tools are very popular precisely because they’re effective. While you can create these without a voice over, the more powerful ones have a voice track. These are usually used for explainer videos or for product reviews.

Advantages

The big advantage of using VideoScribe and other whiteboard video creation tools is that they make whiteboard videos much faster. You can do a hand animation using your actual hand, but that’s going to take forever.

These are just basically pulled from stock art, and the software does it itself. It creates the illusion that it’s drawing these pictures, but the pictures are actually preloaded.

Another great advantage to these videos is that they can easily be enhanced by voiceovers and music. You can easily tell when editing these videos where you’re going to insert those audio elements. In fact, these videos can feature such a nice mix of graphics and audio that they can be offered as “meat and potatoes” marking videos.

Simply put, you can use these to convert the viewer. Of course, a lot of it turns on the quality of your script, but the quality as well as the setup is good enough to convert the viewer. In addition to voice overs and music, you can also enhance it with video clips and other elements.

It is no surprise that VideoScribe automated video creation tools make great explainer videos or short animated ads.

Disadvantages

The big disadvantage with VideoScribe is that it ships with a library of cartoon images. Sadly, most of the people who buy this software don’t bother to customize the cartoon library. Accordingly, a lot of people create videos using the same library and they basically look very similar to each other.

It can get quite ridiculous. I remember watching a video explaining the history of France, and the images in the whiteboard video were the exact same images that I saw from an earlier video on SEO. This kills branding.

It makes the video look generic or, let’s say it, downright cheap. Which begs the question if you’re going to use VideoScribe, you’re going to have to customize it heavily. In other words, you’re going to have to invest in custom cartoons.

Also, whiteboard animation videos don’t really leave much to the imagination. You can’t coast on the quality of the pictures. It basically lives or dies based on the quality of your scripts.

The best type of VideoScribe videos have a lot of manual input. That’s how you maximize quality. However, you can still automate using VideoScribe. In other words, you basically just plug in the audio, plug in the library and just let VideoScribe work its thing.

However, here’s the problem. The more automated or generic-looking your video, the less likely you should use it.

Try not to fully automate. You still have to step in to make sure the quality is decent.