DIY Video Maker: How To Make Great Videos Easily

Not sure how to make a great video or where to even start? Well, you’re in luck! We’re going to show you our pick for a DIY Video Maker tool that will help you create professional-looking videos even if you don’t have a lot of experience. Be sure to watch the video below to see exactly how to do it!

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Read the Full Discussion Below

 

Sarah: Hey, good morning, everyone! Well, let me tell you, when it comes to making video there’s a lot of moving parts. And having a video making tool can help take the guesswork out of creating quality videos and professional-looking videos. So today we’re going to show you our pick for how you can create these great videos with one simple tool.

Kelsi Munn: Good morning and welcome to Marketing Mix! I’m Kelsi Munn, a Social Media Manager with Fusion One Marketing.

Sarah: Good morning. I’m Sarah, I’m the Director of Digital Marketing.

Kelsi Munn: Every week we’re going to have a different segment to highlight different digital marketing topics. We’ll mix it up with interviews, tips, trends, reviews, and Q&A.

Sarah: Yes! So today we are going to talk about our top video maker tool, Animoto. And I’m going to put that down there so you can remember it, Animoto. So, Animoto is a very simple online video making tool, and it’s got this ability to where you can create these videos and customize it as your own with your own photos, images, videos, texts, music. It’s simple and it’s really cool, and we can’t wait to show you about it. I’m going to go ahead and hide that. We’ve got all these little gadgets going on. Okay, so before we get started, though, always have to say that you’ve got to find us on our new podcast, Marketing and a Mic. You can also follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, and we live stream on YouTube and Facebook on our Marketing Mix and Biz Talk shows. So here we are. I’m going to go ahead and pull up Animoto. Alright. Can you see my screen okay, Kelsi?

Kelsi Munn: I sure can.

Sarah: Okay, great. All right. So when you first sign on you’re going to have this screen. And it’s going to ask you if you want to choose a template. And as you can see on the side, you’ve got all these templates. And that’s what I love about it. Just look at this, you’ve got these templates of, what would I call it? Like a shell, it’s a shell that helps you. And you see all that on the left-hand side there, Kelsi?

Kelsi Munn: Yeah, so those are the recommended templates that they provide. So can you tell me how that works?

Sarah: Yes! So again, this is probably one of my favorite things about Animoto. On the side here you can choose the type of template that you want based on the type of video you’re looking to create. So if you want to do a explainer video, if you want to do a motivational video, if you want to do product promotion, all of these options are there. And if you choose that, it gives you these customized little templates that are ready to go and you just have to swap it out. So what we are going to do today is we’re going to do an explainer video for demonstration purposes. So let me go ahead and pop this open. And here it comes, slowly but surely. I think my computer’s waking up this morning just like I am.

Kelsi Munn: Yeah.

Sarah: We’re going to get there. Okay. So I chose a real estate video, which is an explainer video. And it’s for, it’ll tell you that, “Hey, if you want real estate, this type of video is good for …” Whatever it is, it’ll give you certain topics. And then if you select that this’ll pop up. And then on the bottom here you can see that there’s all these slides, there’s 11 slides that are broken down. And each one of these slides, it represents a different frame or a clip with its own text, with its own image, with its own video. And even though they’re broken up down there, they all compile [inaudible 00:04:25] video with really smooth transitions. And so we’re going to go ahead and get into that.

Kelsi Munn: Okay. But what if I like the video the way that it is? So for a real estate person, this would be perfect just as is. Can you produce it that way?

Sarah: Right. Okay. So that’s a good question. The thing about Animoto is, they give you these templates, they give you these shells that have the sample images and videos, but you do have to swap it out and customize it as your own. So it will not produce if you leave it as is. So you’ll have to just go in, swap everything out. It’s really easy, though, and we can just go ahead and get right into that. Because I’m going to show you how you can easily do that. The first thing is, you see this little design button up here at the top? If you click that it’s going to break your video down, and it’s going to break it down slide by slide. And so what you do is, you see this first slide pops up, it says “Over 7 million homes will be sold in the US this year.” And then the option that you have is all these different design settings, to where you can swap it out to whatever suits what you’re looking for. So let’s see here, we’ve got all of these over here. Now, these are called recommended themes. And it’s a recommended color, font, style combos, all of it’s ready to use and you can just pop it in. So what I’ll do is I’ll just click on these and you can see. So now you see that the text changed, the colors changed, the transitions changed. I could go over to this one, true colors, and it’ll show you that it’s got a different filter. It’s got different colors, all these different combos. So I’m going to show you, there’s tons to choose from. So you can just pop these in, whatever looks like it suits what you’re looking for, it’ll stay that way. As you go down, we’ve got these text settings. Now, text settings is where you can change the font, if you want to change the colors. So look, I’m just going to go ahead and click on some of these so you can just see that the font changed right away. I can change the size of the text. I can make the text size bigger, I can make it small. You can see that that’s happening there. I can change the title color, so I could have different colors. See I’m changing that. And then it’s got subtitles, which is, you can do a larger font like this. You see that that’s the font, and then the subtitle is the smaller text at the bottom. So you can change the color on all that too.

Kelsi Munn: So the theme setting has colors, font selected, but if you want to tweak that you can edit all of those features.

Sarah: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s what I love about it. Again, it’s all set for you. So really all you have to do is just swap it out. You even have the ability to, this text that’s showing up, I could move it over to the corner. I can move it to the bottom right, the bottom left, in the middle. So that’s nice too. So if an image and the text seems to be blocking the image you can move it around a little bit.

Kelsi Munn: Cool.

Sarah: And then I do want to touch on the text style. So again, this is how the text appears, and it’ll show you, it’ll either fade, it says fade and expand. So it will fade in and fade out. Or you can do a jump cut, that’s where the text will pop out. And you can see that there. Yeah. So it’s really neat because it helps you get the look and feel of the video. And then there’s this other setting called video settings. Great because it’ll give you your own background color and then your own video style. What that means is that you can present your own transitions and then visually each one of your slides goes into the video. So I’ll cut on a couple of these. Here’s a jump cut. That’s where the text pops real sharply in and out. And you have a zoom in, and if you do a zoom-in then the images will slowly come in and out. Or a fade. Or if you just don’t want any transitions, you just want it to be clean, you can have that option too. And then, of course, we have, there’s different filters. So I could change this to black and white if I wanted to, change it to denim. So again, really easy. And you can just play around with this on the left side and then it’ll [show you how everything is looking here on the preview on the right.

Kelsi Munn: Cool.

Sarah: So let’s close that out.

Kelsi Munn: Well, I see a part that says watermark. What is that?

Sarah: Oh, I’m glad you asked that, Kelsi. Watermark is really neat because you can upload your logo. So what it’ll do is it’ll upload your logo and you can place it wherever you want in the corners of the video. So each slide or transition that comes through, your logos stay there. It’s just a really nice way to customize the video a little bit more to your own brand.

Kelsi Munn: Okay.

Sarah: So-

Kelsi Munn: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off! Well, I see that the video we’re working on right now is in a landscape format, which I know works good on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But what if you’re trying to make a video that you can use on Instagram? Is there a way to adjust the format so it’s more of a square than a rectangle?

Sarah: Yeah, that’s a great question. Okay. So we’ve got the aspect ratio, and basically what that means is that different social media channels have different requirements on the size and the format of the video. So you can’t just have, it’s not really a one size fits all, but what’s neat about this is that you can customize it and it’ll tell you, you can do landscape, which is good for Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn. Square, which also works. Yeah, it also works on Facebook but will only work for Instagram. And then it will tell you here if you want to do a vertical for IGTV, Instagram stories, IGTV, that vertical format works the best. So that’s great. And then what it’ll do is when you choose that option it’ll reformat the entire video for you. So you don’t have to go back in and restructure it to fit that new size.

Kelsi Munn: Awesome.

Sarah: So again, really simple. It just walks you through it on your own as you’re doing it. So yeah.

Kelsi Munn: I’ve got another question for you. So do these templates come with background music or do you have an ability to customize the music?

Sarah: So that’s another great question. So it does. Each video template comes with its own music, and you have the option to either go with the music, so here we go, I’m going to click on that. It’s got its own music library, so you can choose from there or your music library. And I like to break it down by moods or genres. And what am I looking to accomplish with my music? Do I want it to be uplifting, edgy, groovy, whatever it is. And then you can choose in the library, which is humongous. There’s so many options for music. If you have your own music, you can go ahead and choose that too, or you could have no music. If it’s a video that you’re making and it’s just you talking the whole time and you don’t want any music, you can eliminate it too.

Kelsi Munn: Is the music that’s provided in Animoto copyright-friendly, like you can post it anywhere and not have to worry about …

Sarah: Yes.

Kelsi Munn: Okay.

Sarah: Yes. Everything that you choose, yeah, is available to you. And they even, which we’ll touch on this in a minute, but they even have a media library. And what that does is it gives you, it’s another collection of images and videos that are fully available to you to use to swap in. So if you’re creating a video and you don’t really have your own images or don’t really have those, but you want to put something together, it gives you a whole library of stuff that you can choose from.

Kelsi Munn: Oh.

Sarah: So yeah. Yeah. So let’s see. Now I’ve got all this, and I’ll show you a little bit more of how we do this. So let’s say change this out. So you just click on the text, and I’m just going to put in here, “Real Estate.” And so now that I’ve swapped out the text, it’s my own, that slide will work, but I have to take it a step further and I’ve got to swap out the image in the background. So again, you can download what you have if you have something of your own, or you can just go to the stock and search for what you’re looking for. So a home. And what I like is over here it’s got media types. So you can actually decide, do I want to put a photo in here? Do I want to swap it out with a video? Do I want to swap it out with an illustration? And it will tell you too, well, if you’re making a landscape video, why don’t you sort it by horizontal so that only images pop up that will fit this format?

Kelsi Munn: Cool.

Sarah: Here we go. Yeah.

Kelsi Munn: So, if you upload a video, can you shorten it? So say we have a promo video that we’ve already done for our business, but it’s 30 seconds long and I just want to take a five-second snippet from the middle. Can you do that?

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Here, I’m going to show you how you can do that. So I just sorted out of my media library, I don’t know if you saw here, but types, and I sorted it by video.

Kelsi Munn: Okay.

Sarah: So let’s just pick something random here. Let’s pick this kitchen here. And we’re going to just drag and drop, and boom. Again, I talked about too, now we’ve got this text that’s right here in the middle. I don’t really like that, but I can move it. So I can move it and get it away. And then I can play the video. And the video is going to start playing, but you can see that this video is actually 17 seconds long. Well, I don’t want to show 17 seconds of this video. So I can go over to scissors and I can trim the video, and I can trim it at the beginning of it, and it’s going to go along with me as to where it’s going to start.

Kelsi Munn: Yeah. You skipped out there and glitched a little bit. Did you say click the scissors to get there?

Sarah: Yes, I did. So can you see better, popping up okay?

Kelsi Munn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sarah: Okay, great. So what I did, and I’ll go back out and cancel all this so that you can see it again, but there’s this trim clip right here, see these little scissors? Here on the corner it says that this video clip is 17 seconds. So I’ll just click on those scissors, and then I can trim it to however I want. So let’s say I’m going to trim it to 14 seconds right here, and I hit it. Now, that’s all I needed to do on that slide. And it’s mine and I’m happy with it. But yeah, again, you’ve got all these other slides down here at the bottom that you just have to swap it out with your own text and your own video or your own image. And you could even, if you don’t want to use all this, this video is 40 seconds long as you can see down on the corner, say I only want to make a 30-second video, I can go through here and just delete some of the slides I don’t need. I can actually duplicate some of the slides if I like the look and feel of it. So you can rearrange it all to your liking. So it would be really easy, see it down here, if you could see that trash can, you can say, “Well, I don’t really need that, so I can delete it.”

Kelsi Munn: Okay.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kelsi Munn: Are there other features that you can customize on the slides besides the text and the photo or video?

Sarah: Yes. Yeah. So over here is change layout, and I really like this a lot. So it is, again, giving you a little different look and feel of your slides, and you can do it slide by slide. So right now this layout is just this full frame right here, but let’s say I want to switch it up a little bit. Well, I can change this over here. I don’t really like this background color, so I can go over here and click it to whatever color I like. And again, you can move this text around to wherever you want to put it, which is, again, really, really easy. And there’s more layouts. You’ve got side by side if you want to do two images next to each other, and it’ll tell you to just drag your next picture.

Kelsi Munn: Oh.

Sarah: So yeah, it’s really great. So you’ve got all these different layouts that you can use and customize it to your own and just switch it up. And again, it’s just a drag and drop. It’s easy. If I find something, if I go to this next video, this one, about the image, let’s say I want to do … I don’t want to do a video, I want to do an image. The library is going to pull up and I just drag, drop it. All of these images are available to me. And then I can just change the text again. So it’s really, really easy.

Kelsi Munn: So, it is really easy. Is it a free program, or do you need to pay for it to use it?

Sarah: Nice house, because that really is a nice house. You can put, “Dreamhouse” with arrows. Okay. Yes. I’m glad you brought that up. So Animoto does have a free plan. However, it’s limited. I recommend the professional version, and the monthly price just depends on if you pay by the month or if you pay annually. So again, it is free, you won’t have all the features, there are some limitations to it. So if you are going to get it, I would just go all out and get the professional version, and there you go. So when you’re done with this video, and you want to use it, all you’d have to do is just click export and it’s going to download the video, and you can just save it onto your computer or you can grab a link and you can send the link out. But yeah, I don’t know if this is going to work because my lovely Internet is just being so kind to me today. But if it doesn’t, we’ll just go ahead and cut on out of it. But you get the idea. But it’s really easy. Again, you just have to find what you want, customize it, drop. And I’m just going to close this guy out because …

Kelsi Munn: It’s slowing you down.

Sarah: Not working with me at all.

Kelsi Munn: So is this one of the main tools that we use for our clients when we create videos from Fusion One?

Sarah: Yeah. Well, it’s one of them. I just want to pop in and show this real quick.

Kelsi Munn: Okay.

Sarah: I feel like I went a little fast on this part of the beginning, but I do want to show everyone that you do have an option to pick your type of template. And if you go through it, say if you want a slide show or say you want motivational, it’s going to give you all of these options already that you can just pick. And it’ll give you a little preview of it too, which is kind of cool. So you can see here. It’s a preview of what it’s going to look like. And what it does too is it’ll tell you, “Hey, this video and its format is available to use for YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, great for the health and wellness, community and cause.” And so it gives you, again, a breakdown of, this is what this video would be best for and this is how it’s themed. So I think that’s really cool. So sorry, Kelsi, I just wanted to touch back on that.

Kelsi Munn: Oh, no, you’re fine.

Sarah: So, I’m going to go ahead and get out of here. And we’re back, and I’m back.

Kelsi Munn: I put our names up so people know who we are.

Sarah: So yeah, I want to expand a little bit more on the video concept itself. So this tool is very helpful. And the reason why I chose it, again, is it’s really easy for you to swap things out and to make your own customized videos. That being said, though, making a video takes time. And this is one of the tools that we use. We use a lot of different video tools for our clients. There are other things that you have to do to videos, but if you want a do it yourself, this is a good recommendation. But it takes time. You do have to have a process, you have to write down your script. You have to know your content. You’ve got to get all of your images together and put it all together. So it can be very time-consuming. So with a lot of our clients, what we do is they just turn to us as a great resource to say, “Hey, I’m looking to put this type of video together,” and we can draft it for them. We could put together the script, we could do it all for them so that it’s out of their mind and it saves them a heck of a lot of time, which is very valuable.

Kelsi Munn: Absolutely. We all also know the power that video has in viewership and engagement on social media these days. So having a resource like that is huge for business owners that don’t have time to do it.

Sarah: Oh yeah, absolutely. For us, we’ve been doing the Biz Talk series, we’ve been doing the Marketing Mix. Our videos have been so powerful in engagement and viewers. So I just can’t recommend enough that putting videos out there is very helpful. And if you do want a video that has a lot more bells and whistles to it, having a video maker tool is really, really valuable.

Kelsi Munn: Absolutely. Well, is that about it for us today?

Sarah: Yeah, that’s it today. I hope you all got something out of that. I hope it was valuable to you. If you have questions about this or if you’d like to learn more about the video services that we offer, please send us a message. And just so you know, make sure you tune in for our Biz Talk on Friday. We’ve got a great guest, Kristine Sizemore, and we can’t wait to tune in. Thank you all so much for joining. Bye. Oh, my finger. I had a slip. Now we’re really going to go, guys.