Online video has become the essential tool for businesses to effectively communicate with their audiences, potential customers, employees and other stakeholders. As video’s importance rises so do the technologies that enable online video such as hosting, distribution, monetization, publishing, collaboration, interactivity and content creation software tools.
The demand for video content creation has resulted in a new industry of software designed to make it easy for businesses to create video. After all the biggest challenge now is creating great video content fast enough to keep up with demand. Whether its basic video editing, animated storytelling, batch video creation, or personalized video — there are a ton of new tools out there to choose from. This short guide will break down evaluation criteria for choosing the right video content creation tools for your organization.
What are your goals with video content creation?
Before you start browsing through solutions in our directory, first stop and make a list all your goals and requirements. Here’s a sample of what this could look like:
First, the goals:
- Produce and publish one video a week
- Produce videos that follow brand guidelines
- Enable various team members to create their own videos
- Ramp to content publishing and establish velocity
Second, the requirements:
- Need to be able to create videos from existing images and text
- Need access to royalty free music and video clips
- Access to voiceover talent
- Need to animate and create explainer videos
- Quick publish to YouTube and online video platform
- Need to manage my team accessing the tool and their rights and roles
Since video content creation software is really about the content, make sure to think through why you are creating the content in the first place. Here are a series of questions to ask internally:
- What purpose will the video serve (to educate, drive website traffic, change outside parties’ perceptions of your organization, etc.)?
- What type of audience will be watching the video—who is this video being made for?
- Will the video be heavily interview-driven, or action-oriented showing mostly general video with just an off-screen narrator (or a mix of all three)?
- Do you have a specific look/feel in mind (news, corporate, slick vs. rougher and less polished)?
- Will there be a need for graphics and/or animation in the video (an opening logo sequence, on-screen identifiers, on screen maps, graphs or charts)?
- Will there be a need for music in the video? Will you (the client) be providing the music, or will the production company be furnishing music?
- Will there be a need for captioning for the hearing impaired?
- Where will the final video be seen?
Once you have listed out goals and requirements you can then move on to establish your evaluation criteria. To make it easy for you we’ve gone ahead and created a pre-established evaluation criteria for video content creation platforms. You’ll be evaluating video content creation platform providers that fit into one of these categories:
- Desktop screen and webcam capture
- Manual content assembly based on template
- Automated content assembly based on template
- Animation creation, voice over, music, sound effects
- Personalized content assembly based on template
- Live capture and broadcast
10 Key Video Content Creation Platform Evaluation Criteria
Here are the main criteria to base your evaluation on:
- Content Management: Can you easily upload video clips, sync with online assets, organize videos by folder, playlist, etc. How is the full content lifecycle managed within the platform? As your library grows in size and complexity you want to make sure its accessible. Does it have screen capture functionality?
- Design Canvas: How do you design video content? Is it easy to drag and drop elements into a canvas? Add transitions? Text and voice tracks? Using iMovie as a benchmark for simplicity, how similar is it? Are there storyboarding features for conception and brainstorming?
- Pre-Established Templates: Does the tool offer templates for specific videos types such as a promotional video, Facebook video add, animated explainer, etc? Do those templates include text placeholders that can be edited? Do templates also offer audio tracks such as music and sound effects? How about transitions such as fades, wipes and others?
- Professional Audio & Video Clips: Is there in-app access to libraries of professional royalty free audio and video clips? Are there both free and paid options available? Can you purchase and work with voiceover talent directly within the app?
- Transitions & Effects: Is it easy to apply transitions and effects to videos on the creation or editing canvas? Are there pre-established effects like fades, blurs, wipes, etc? Can effects and transitions be edited and adjusted frame-by-frame?
- Animation & Storytelling: Does the tool have the ability to create animated content from scratch using character and scene libraries? Can you manipulate the character’s actions and movements? Are there interactive features for ‘choose your own adventure’ storytelling?
- Team and Collaboration: Does the tool have features that enable different teams and individuals to produce their own content? Can various team members collaborate on a specific video? Is it easy to limit or grant access to different system roles?
- Integrations: Can the tool integrate easily with other online video platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo and other premium OVPs to make it easy to push finished content out for publishing? Does the user management system connect with Single Sign-On solutions?
- Security & Scale: Is the tool encrypted and secure with restriction to content? Can administrators protect individual projects and videos? Can user access easily be granted and revoked by admins? Can the platform handle large video files including up to 4k resolution? How is the platform hosted and does it have global reach outside of the U.S.?
- Content Personalization: Does the platform provide content personalization? The ability to automatically generate videos for each contact based on a spreadsheet of contact data?
Conclusion
Use the 10 criteria above to put together your requirements for a online video platform for content creation. You can also browse the best video content creation platforms available in our directory here.
