Today, we tried using Lumen5 to automatically convert blog posts to videos
An e-mail floated across our desks this morning from Social Media Examiner exploring the beta Lumen5 blog-to-video creation tool. So we signed up for it and gave it a whirl. In less than a half hour, we had a respectable first version video.
Here are our observations:
It’s very easy to use, requires little in the way of tutorial, unlike most other content creation tools. You specify the blog post URL. You can then highlight the things in your content that you want to appear in the video. Lumen5 highlights some of the words with a color (which you can edit), and does a decent job of picking out the most important words. Overall, we found the tool very easy to use and faster than using comparable tools for the style of video (such as PowerPoint.) There are a few things which make this video your own, and that you should know:
- You can upload your own photos
- It’s more like a slideshow than a video
- You need a photo for every slide ‘bite’ you insert, so expect to have 8-12 photos handy from your own photo library for a 50-second to one-minute video
- You can pick from the Lumen5 music library
- Lumen5 will send you an e-mail when your video is done rendering. Don’t wait around for it, just move on and grab it later. It took 1.5 hours to render the video
- You don’t need high-end video creation skills to use this tool
It does have a slight PowerPoint-y feel to the video, complete with the Ken Burns transitions, but it’s not bad for 30 minutes of work. We are MOST intrigued by their AI features that say that they can automatically read your next blog post, create a video for you from it with no effort on your part. That seems too good to be true (you will need to do some editing.) But overall, we’re intrigued enough to play around with actual video blogs to see what it does as well as kick around the AI features. We will report back (with video blogs!) on our experiences.
Oh, and we had to put this video on Facebook and then embed the video using Facebook’s video embed code. It’s a great way to share video content you’re creating on social media (such as live video).
Tell us what you think of our video:
