WRITTEN BY SPENCER COWLEY, WRITER & EDITOR AT BYVI
Projects ranging from major motion pictures to independent YouTube video essays leverage video to convey complex ideas and emotion through visual and sonic elements. Video is one of the most engaging media for storytelling due to its visual appeal and ability to elicit strong emotional connections.
While video is one of the most appealing ways to tell a story, creating impactful and engaging videos is not an easy task. Whether a creator is cutting one long clip or connecting hundreds of clips into a full piece, most video editing software is far from intuitive. Though powerful, most paid editors overwhelm inexperienced users with unnecessary features and film industry lingo. Simpler, cheaper editors may not have efficient functionality like the rest.
Regardless of software, one of the biggest challenges that both new and experienced editors face is time — even short videos can take hours to edit effectively. This is only exacerbated by a lack of experience with a given program.
Another side effect of using video for your content is that videos are typically made to stand alone. But what if the content within your video could generate value as a text-based article or a short story? Transcription programs exist, but can only be utilized after a video is filmed and edited.
These problems illustrate a void in this industry rife with opportunity – users are searching for a no-frills way to get their videos edited quickly, in a way they can understand without a major tutorial.
Type Studio – The Text-Based Video Editor
Type Studio is a startup SaaS platform that lets users edit videos by editing text. Users can upload or record their video directly in the browser-accessible program, and Type Studio will automatically transcribe the video with reliable accuracy. Then, users can manually edit the transcribed text and see their edits applied to the video directly. No timeline cuts or shortening of clips – just work within the text and the video follows.
Type Studio can even detect the pauses between words and unnecessary filler words when someone is speaking in the video. Then, there’s an option to quickly delete all pauses longer than a certain amount of beats. Users can cut down their videos with the press of a button, just by cutting out any long pauses and fillers. If a user loses their place, they can easily search through the transcription for a specific word or phrase and jump to it seamlessly.
Users of Type Studio can go even further than just basic cuts – features like images, shapes, text and other visual elements can be added into the video. Using the text editor, users can indicate when these visual elements should show up on screen based on the words being said in the video. Type Studio even integrates with Pexels to deliver tons of free stock photos and art that users can easily add into their videos.
Features and Benefits
We’ve just scratched the surface, so let’s breakdown everything that Type Studio has to offer for their paid plan:
- Text-based video editing
- Edit videos up to 30 minutes long
- Video transcription
- Automatic detection and removal of pauses and filler words
- Custom and stock images, text and visual elements
- Automatic subtitles & subtitle export
- Searchable transcription
- Large variety of video design templates
- Translation to 28+ languages
- Collaboration on all projects
If you just want to try Type Studio out, they also offer a free plan with 20 minutes of upload time and some editing features locked.
Who is Type Studio made for?
All of this combines to make one pretty powerful and useful video editor for users with simple needs for their videos. Due to the text-based format of Type Studio, however, the software is really only suitable for videos that contain a decent amount of words.
This means Type Studio is really made for the creators who are including a lot of monologues or dialogue in their videos – video essays or other narrated, informational videos, for example. Video podcasts would be another great example, especially for users who might want to take advantage of the automatic transcription to turn their video into a blog post — whereas video essays are typically written before production, live recordings like podcasts could greatly benefit from Type Studio.
The Verdict
Above all, Type Studio is intuitive and easy to use for anyone, especially someone who lacks serious video editing experience. Creating a video based around speech can be accomplished quickly, depending on how many extra visuals you want to add. Plus, the ability to transcribe your videos gives creators an easy way to expand the value of their videos by turning them into a written piece they can publish anywhere.
Though Type Studio cannot stand up to most major video editing software for piecing together many different clips of long duration, it absolutely stands out in its niche and offers a fast and easy way to edit video. With an affordable monthly subscription and the fact that this startup is likely to continue to expand and improve the software, Type Studio is a worthy option for less experienced editors with convenience in mind.
Want to see Type Studio in action? You can watch the video version of this post, recorded and edited fully in Type Studio!
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