06 Jul 23 | 15:15:15
Video is an amazing asset to add to your marketing, but it’s a difficult skill to learn, especially if you’re not familiar with video editing programs such as Premier Pro or Final Cut Pro. However, with the rise of AI, it’s become easier than ever to create videos.
Lately at Podymos, we’ve been looking into AI to find tools that can truly elevate your marketing.
This article compares two popular AI video tools, Kapwing and Descript, so you can decide which one is right for you.
It’s designed to be easy to use, even for beginners, and doesn’t require any prior video editing experience or knowledge.
Primarily, it’s a tool best suited to educators and marketers as it can be used to create educational materials, presentations, and marketing videos.
Kapwing has some amazing features powered by AI, which are not only cool, but will save you and your team a significant amount of time and budget when it comes to content creation, especially for social media.
Kapwing uses AI to help you create professional-looking videos. Its non-linear editor allows users to rearrange and alter content on a single timeline. This means that you can easily change the order of your clips, add or remove footage, and make other changes without having to start from scratch.
With Kapwing, you can also adjust the position and layout, and add special effects such as blur, animations, chroma key, speed up and slowing down a video, all to make eye-catching and shareable videos.
Clean, clear audio is key to creating engaging videos, but it can be hard to master with traditional software. Kapwing can remove background noise from your videos at the swipe of a toggle.
This sharpens the sound, so you get a studio quality audio track without requiring the studio quality hardware – A pretty cool feature for budding content creators.
If you need to add a voiceover to your video but you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself or don’t want to pay for a voiceover artist, Kapwing can generate a voiceover.
It uses AI to create a track that sounds like a human reading the script, with realistic inflections and emphasis. We were blown away by this feature, although in today’s world of AI, we shouldn’t have been surprised.
Kapwing has a neat trick that allows you to edit your videos by editing the text transcript. As you edit the transcript, the corresponding part of your video will be automatically trimmed or added. This allows you to edit your videos quickly without meticulously zooming in and out of your video timeline to cut in the correct place.
Smart cut is a feature that automatically detects and removes silences in your videos, so you can save time by not having to search for and edit them yourself. This could be super helpful in an interview for example, when the interviewee is silent whilst considering their answer.
Kapwing can automatically transcribe your videos, so you can easily create subtitles or search for specific words or phrases. This is a great asset when transcribing interviews to then recycle into articles.
At Podymos, we’re always thinking about how we can reuse content to maximise outputs, so this is a great feature. To learn more about how to get the most out of your content, check out our guide on what is the best way to repurpose your marketing content.
Sharing your work with Kapwing is straightforward as it allows you to collaborate with others on video and podcast projects from anywhere, on any device. This can improve team collaboration and the reviewing process.
Once you’ve finished creating your podcast or video, you can distribute it across your channels using the social media feature, saving you the headache of downloading and re-uploading your creations.
Kapwing offers a free and a paid price plan. The free plan offers access to most of the features in the pro plan, but has limited capacity, whereas the paid plan allows unlimited uploads and editing.
Similarly, Descript is an all-in-one video and podcast editing software. It offers a large host of editing tools including special effects and transcription.
Just like Kapwing, it has an intuitive interface that doesn’t require any prior video editing experience and is also well-suited to marketers and professionals looking to create materials such as podcasts, social media videos and educational guides.
Despite the level of overlap between the platforms in the features they offer, Descript has a few unique features to set it apart.
This section of the article will run through the main features of Descript, so you can judge if it has everything you’re looking for.
Video editing is the main function of Descript, with this tool you can edit, create, and build your videos to suit your company’s brand and marketing. You can add value to your videos with tools such as motion tracking, colour grading, text overlays, and blur and zoom.
Much like its competitor, Descript can automatically transcribe your audio and video recordings, to create subtitles for your videos. You can then search the audio for words or phrases to navigate through sections efficiently.
Descript’s unique overdub feature allows you to replace words or phrases in your audio recordings with a different voice, even your own. So, if you’ve recorded a podcast and said something wrong, it’s easy to replace it.
This green screen feature allows you to remove your background from your videos and replace it with a different background., which can be helpful if you’re working with a distracting background, or you want consistency throughout your videos.
The studio sound feature allows you to improve the sound quality of your audio recordings by removing background noise and adjusting the levels.
Background noise is a thing of the past as both Kapwing and Descript provide great noise-cancelling software to remove unwanted sounds from your audio recordings.
This feature allows you to generate a voiceover for your video based on a text transcript, in the same way that Kapwing does.
Although still mostly intuitive to use, Descript is slightly less accessible than its competitor as it requires users to download the app to use it. Furthermore, our team found that it required more of a learning curve to start using the app effectively because it wasn’t as clearly labelled as Kapwing.
Descript has a lot more options for pricing than Kapwing. Whilst it has a free plan, it also has three other pricing plans with a variety of options. They are ‘Creator’, ‘Pro’ and ‘Enterprise.
You get access to all the main features across the different plans, however differences come from allowances, creativity, storage, and export quality.
While Kapwing has lots to offer as a video editing tool, there are some issues that have frustrated users.
Kapwing adds a watermark to all videos created with the free plan. This can be removed by upgrading to a paid plan, but it can be annoying for those who are on a budget.
The free plan offers limited capabilities across it’s features, such as the ability to add text, images, and music to videos. If you need more advanced features, you will need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Kapwing struggles when working with large files or using a lot of features at once. This can be frustrating if you’re trying to edit a video quickly because you’re working to a deadline.
Descript is useful for adding value to your company’s marketing videos, but users have experienced some problems, here is a list of the top problems that other people have had with the tool.
Some people have found that the text-based editing feature can be difficult to use, especially for complex videos. Additionally, the AI transcription feature is not always accurate, and it can be difficult to correct errors. This isn’t great if you’re editing a long, speech-heavy text, as you can end up spending a significant chunk of time updating the script.
Much like Kapwing, the software can be slow when working with large files.
As we said, the user interface requires a learning curve as it’s less intuitive than its competitor.
Hopefully, this article should have given you a clearer view of what both platforms have to offer but at the end of the day, you’ll want to know what is right for you. Every marketer has different needs so the solution might be for you to try both out and see which one is the better fit.
However, in our experience, each tool is better suited to different types of marketers.
If AI is something that you’re interested in have a look at our other articles:
Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want a high-quality video to support your larger multichannel marketing strategy? If so, you’ve come to the right place.
Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing.
We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.
If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no-obligation chat.
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