Quick Review : Flexclip

Hey folks. The nice people at Pearl Mountain invited me to have a look at their online video editing toolset that is called Flexclip.

At first, I wasn’t going to do so, because I didn’t think that I could do a fair review, as I am a professional video editor and I don’t think that I’m the target audience, and while pros certainly can use Flexclip, my assessment is that it is best suited for people wanting to make fast, fun, easily shareable videos that look great, but where no real editing skill is required.

Truth to tell, I probably took longer than most would getting to being functional because of my professional background. I made things more complicated than they needed to be.

So in order to be fair, I took on the role of the non-professional video maker. That is, no lighting, no fancy audio, just some clips shot on my iPhone and nothing else.

I still cannot bring myself to shoot vertical video, but that’s not anyone’s issue but mine. Be completely certain that Flexclip works with both vertical and horizontal video. Given the adoption of tools like TikTok and YouTube shorts, I conclude that vertical video is a real thing, even though I don’t care for it.

Editing My First Flexclip Production

So I signed into my demo account provided by Pearl Mountain for this review and uploaded three clips of our cats. They are examples of what I see on YouTube quite commonly. Videos that mean something to the creator that may or may not matter to anyone else, and that is perfectly ok. These are the video equivalent of snapshots and that is a good thing indeed.

Once uploaded, I used the interface to add my three videos to the timeline by clicking the plus button to add a scene using the video. There are simple handles to do trims on either end and you can easily split any clip and remove sections if you want to. Stringing together the basic timeline took less than a minute.

Then I wanted a title that had some movement. Flexclip provides a ton of content to those with an account, so I picked a title sequence from their large selection and added it. A double click on the placeholder text, made it editable, and resizable and I was done in about twenty seconds.

Next I right clicked on each clip and chose the detach audio option, because there was no audio in my clips that I wanted to hear. Then I selected the detached audio tracks and deleted them. So now I have a silent timeline, which is boring. Total time spent about 30 seconds.

I auditioned a number of the audio tracks that are part of Flexclip, found one that I liked and added it. What was very cool is when I later added another scene, the audio background track automatically resized to fit the length of the entire short video. So very simple. Total time, a couple of minutes with about a minute 50 spent in auditioning and about 10 seconds figuring out how to get it inserted and testing the playback.

Where scenes butt up against each other there is a simple icon to click and then you have a ton of transitions to choose from. Personally, I am not a big transition person and to me, many are way over the top, but for fun I picked a few to try. In and done. About 10 seconds.

I also noticed the ability to put in overlays or what Flexclip calls Effects. There is a large library of effects to choose from and you can apply unique ones to individual clips. So I did. About 3 seconds each, once I had found some really kitsch ones to use. By the way, when you mouse over an effect and have a clip selected, you see what it will look like in a preview before you apply it at all.

You can laugh at how long it took me to figure out how to do a fade to black at the end. In pro video editors, this function is typically a timed transition. I looked for a transition at the end of the clip, and no joy. I checked the FAQ searching for Fade to Black, no joy. Then it finally clicked that Flexclip treats videos as a series of what they call scenes, so I added a blank scene, and without content added to it, it is black. I put a transition between my final clip and the black scene and achieved my fade to black and then used the handle to shorten the scene duration to what I thought was an acceptable fade out.

Now that I know, it’s really easy, about 10 seconds required but I would encourage the good folks at Pearl Mountain to add a Fade to Black option if one is not there and if it is there, make it stunningly obvious to people like myself. It’s possible that fade to black and credit rolls are not a big deal for the target market, as that’s not my area of video expertise.

Once you are happy with your video, you need to export it in order to share it. Flexclip says to stay on that page while doing the export and you really MUST follow that instruction. I navigated away as part of my test and the export paused. I will not say that the export is quick, because it isn’t. My 34 second video which was admittedly loaded down with stuff, exported to 1080p took about 4 minutes, and knowing how impatient some people are, this could be a potential issue for Flexclip. I will say that the final product looks very good and plays smoothly without any of the jerkiness I have seen from some other online rendering. Once rendered, you can share your video directly to a Youtube, Dropbox, OneDrive and Google. There is even a whitelist switch if you are using stock content in your final product to help you out with Youtube. The rendered video is also available for download, which you can find from your account home page under My Projects. While I had done more than one render, only the final one was available.

Here Be Cats

This version is in 720p because Squarespace choked on the 1080p version.

Pricing

You can create your demo account at https://flexclip.com but to really get the value out of the program, you buy a plan. I have pasted a graphic of their plan page.

Final Thoughts

While I would personally not use Flexclip for my commercial projects, for short simple stuff, it is a great tool. It is very quick and easy to use. I made note of the time to use in each section, because for who I believe the target market to be, time is of the essence. While some may balk at what looks like the monthly cost, be reminded that there are audio clips, video clips, text blocks, still images, creative elements, creative effects and AI tools all included at the noted pricing. For a business marketing department that needs the ability to standardize their look and be able to get videos out on social media FAST, the Teams option is definitely worth looking at.

I don’t see a tool like Flexclip stealing business from serious professionals, and in fact as people and businesses see what can be done, when the project gets complex, they will likely be more inclined to reach out to a professional.

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