Pictory – Transform an Article into a Video via AI

What do you do when you promote your article, articles are a written form, and when you have build it out and published it, you need to promote it. Otherwise, no one is going to know about your article. Today’s product showcase is Pictory and via Pictory, you can transform your article into a video. In 2021 video marketing is king, we love watching videos compared to reading and we have never been busier. So Pictory which can turn your article into a video within a couple of minutes, is perfect for you.

So without further ado, let’s dive in to Pictory and let me show you how you can transform your article into a video. Signing into Pictory, this is our standpoint where we start everything, here we can choose whether we want to create a video from an article, from a script, from visuals, or we want to edit our video with voice and using text. These four possibilities are here right now. Furthermore, up here, we have our projects, which is the videos we have already created.

Then we have our brand settings, which is going to save us a lot of time because in here we can enter our brand name. We can add our logo, where the logo should be previewed. If we have an intro, we always want to be displayed on our videos. We can also add it here and the same with an outro. Furthermore, we can also design how the title should be in here, what font and the font size. Furthermore, the colour, the background and the keyword colour.

And then of course we can in here choose the scenes as well so you can build an entire brand kit which will save you even more time building out these videos, because already now Pictory is saving us a lot of time by generating a video, based on text that we’ve already written. But also, of course, we need to work a little bit with the video, but with a brand kit, it will make it a lot easier. And you can easily put your logo on all of your videos.

But let’s go back to our standpoint and let’s try and generate a video from an article I have written. So here is the article, it’s called Top 8 SEO Mistakes to Avoid for increasing traffic in 2021. I have now plotted it in to Pictory, so let’s see what the result will be. What it does while we wait here is that you can see it is extracting the key messages in the article so it finds whatever it finds the most relevant in the article because this text it is going to use from the article into the video, it is now done.

And you can see our entire article is over here on the left with images and everything. And it has taken it quite well because I have more text after the article, but it has cut that out, so that’s great to see. And over here on the right is what it will use for the video. And here you can basically see it’s just taking all of the headlines, which is great because that is important. However, the conclusion and FAQ is not as important, so I would like to delete that.

However, I cannot do that, that’s the thing I would like to see in the future, at least because over here you can see it is AI powered. So their AI has taken out all of these texts and find it relevant for them to generate the video. I cannot edit it, but now let’s try and go to the next step. Where it is that we need to choose the aspect ratio for our video. And this is, of course, depending on what platform you’re going to use it on.

For instance, if it is on Instagram, the square would be very good. But if it is on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, the landscape is maybe a little bit more relevant. And the portrait is great for, as you can see down here, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as well. But for now, let’s just go with the landscape right here. And now it is really just generating the video based on the text we saw just before it is now done.

It took around eight to ten seconds. It was very, very fast. And you can see now we have our video editor. It is very simplified, but it works very well at the moment. However, let’s see how the video is and what the quality of the video is. And it’s the visualisation is really as good as it needs to be. So, of course, what we can do is that first we can just start to preview it.

That’s what I often do just to see where I’m at and where my standpoint is. And when you do press preview, it is only showing the slide that you’re on the scene right now. If you want to do see the whole video, you need to press preview up here. But for now, I’ll just click through the scenes. The first scene is fine. It is just my image I have on my website. The next scene is also OK.

Still about SEO, then it’s using my picture again. That black background here is not what I would prefer that we can change. Then we have a mistake, one using issue without a clear goal 404. Yeah, it’s OK. It could be better, it could be a little bit more a guy working with you or something similar. Here we have some SEO technique which it uses as the keyword to find the media, which is in this case, of course, a video background.

This is OK. It is not waow but it’s OK. And here it’s also OK, I would say. Here we get a little bit away from the image and from the video I want to create because it has nothing to do with the word quantity. This is just a mistake, but maybe I should have been more relevant about this line here. Mistake three that you need to focus on quality content, not so much quantity. And it would be great if I could edit just before because then I would be able to specify exactly that.

So overall, the video is OK. It’s not as bad as some of my other testing, but it is OK as a standpoint because of course we can edit it. So for instance, this slide here, the video is completely off. So what I’ll do is I’ll go to visuals over here and then we can change another video. We have our library, textures, my own uploads and recent of course. So here, I think I will search more for let’s try and search for content, I have now chosen the guy here who’s writing on a whiteboard.

I would like to choose a little bit more a guy or girl writing content on a piece of paper with a computer. But for now, I’ll just go with this one here. And now we have already changed one scene in order to make the entire video a lot better. And you saw how fast that was. If I want to, I can, of course, also change the texture right here. So, for instance, this one here, I can’t really change the black background because the image here is transparent.

I would like to be able to enter a texture on the background. But as you can see, when I press here, then it changes the entire thing just to the texture. And that is a little bit boring to look at. I would like to be able to change the texture on the background, but still keep my image in the front. Now, another thing over here is audio, because we can attach a music track to the entire video.

And right now it has just chosen creative solutions, which it is playing in the background in the entire video, and that is fine. You can see here the music tracks that they have. They do not have as many as I would like them to have. But of course, they also have the voice over, and the voice is very important. Here you can see that they have a lot of predefined voiceovers, which is in US English, UK English, Australian English and Indian English right now.

So it is limited. Of course, if you do want to do it in your own language, you can over here upload your voiceover or record your voiceover, which I’ll also talk a little bit about later in this video when we talk about the future. If we do want to, we can also trim the video in order to make it shorter, of course. So let’s say that this is a little bit boring of a scene to have.

So I’ll just cut it down to six seconds right here. And now we have just trimmed it down to six seconds instead of ten seconds. And we can, of course, always see what the estimated video duration will be up here. Furthermore, over in the menu, we can choose the style of the entire video, whether it should be as it is now, just the image with the text in the bottom with the keyword highlighted in a certain colour.

We can also change to a little bit more of a book style right here, or we can go with an entire different type of theme here. Where it moves all the text to the left. And you can see they have a lot of different themes here. They have eight themes you can choose between. Furthermore, between these scenes, there are, of course, transitions and these transitions you can also choose. But be careful because it is so easy to make it look like a PowerPoint from 2003 with all of these transitions in between.

Last but not least, we can always change the format, of course, if we do want to. So let’s say that you chose the landscape, but you actually wanted to work a little bit more with the square. It is as easy as this just to change it. And now we’re working on a square video up here. Remember to press 1080P if you do want that. If 720P is OK for you, you can also keep that.

And what I always do is that I optimise the generated video for size, because when you upload it to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, they compress it completely. So if you optimise already, it will not be as compressed as it would be if you didn’t optimise it. Furthermore, over here in the Settings section, we can choose whether we want to hide the text. I will not recommend this unless you are 100% sure that you will always have audio on your video.

We can choose whether we want a visual zoom and pan. This creates a little bit visualisation and creates life around your video. So that is a great thing to have. Furthermore, in the audio, we can choose whether we want to mute the upload video, which is running the background. And if we do want background music, all of these elements are creating life around the video, which is great because you need to stick the user to watch your video from start to end.

But last but not least, when you are satisfied with your video, which we are right now, we can go up here and press generate. And what it will do now is that will create all the scenes it will generate the video and then it will optimise the video for us, because as you just remember, we just pressed the video should be optimised for the size. And as I said in the introduction, that video marketing is king in 2021.

You can see that there are some funny notes down here and it’s said that all of the traffic sources in 2021, 80% are just videos. Overall that is the functionality within Pictory. Be aware that when you generate a video, it does take a lot of time. It is something they’re working on because for them to be a productive tool and especially within video, we can of course not wait a long time to get our video out, which is one minute and 50 seconds right now.

It should be rather fast to export that. Taking a look at Pictory’s is pricing structure, that consists of four plans, whereas they differ on the amount of videos you can work with, the minutes, the features and more, as you can see here on the screen. You can get started completely free with three videos, with full functionality where you’re only limited on the minutes and storage. If you do want unlimited of everything, that is not possible. However, with their premium plan, you get a lot of functionality and a lot of videos to work with.

So you should be able to come very far with that plan, even though you’re a big company. The pricing structure can be quite confusing because there are so many elements that it is differing on. I would like to see a more simple pricing structure where we are maybe only limited on the amount of videos or the minutes. Right now it is just too many elements that it is differing on.

Taking a look at the competitors to picture it, as I see it, it is InVideo. InVideo has a lot more than the functionality of just converting an article into a video. It is also an entire video editor. More than what we see right now with Pictory. Within InVideo, they were the first, as far as I’m aware of, within the industry of being able to enter an URL and out we’ll get a video. However, the videos differ a little bit in the quality, I would say based on my testing, I have not been able to get a lot of good quality videos out from articles.

But of course, you get a good standpoint and then from there you can always work your way out. But InVideo, as they have a lot more functionality than Pictory, I am still a big fan of InVideo. Moving on to the future within Pictory it is very exciting, they have a very packed roadmap. For instance, sooner or later you can control the volume. They are making a lot of improvements to the subtitles and that’s important because right now on social media, subtitles is king in order to understand videos, because videos are played without sound a lot.

Furthermore, they’re working on better user input so you can create better visualisation within your videos. They are also working on that you can add your own voice over because right now within Pictory you can only choose predefined voice overs. And adding your own voice over is another unique element for your video. Of course, they are also working on the video editor, making it more fast, reliable and adding more features that we also see within InVideo for instance. Last but not least, as what I find important, is that they are adding integrations so we can upload videos to YouTube, to Vimeo, to Google Drive in an easy way without we have to use a middle station like our computer.

But their road map is definitely one of the most packed road maps I have seen within the reviews that I have done here on YouTube. Now, who is the target group for Pictory? As I see it, it is bloggers and smaller companies. Overall, it is just content creators who are looking to improve engagement and be more productive in their content creation flow because using Pictory you not only save time, but you also promote the articles you build on your website.

So if you have a website where you build articles, Pictory is definitely for you. Moving on to the pros and cons within Pictory, starting with the pros, they have a fast and responsive web app. They generate videos fast. You can convert both articles, script and visuals to a video, and they have an integration to Shutterstock. Whereas the cons is that you cannot build a video from scratch and the videos generated are often a bit low in quality and they do not have as many music tracks as I would like them to.

Using Pictory, I can really create videos fast for all of my articles. I save an enormous amount of time on reaching a standpoint where I can work on. They are not a polished product yet, but with their roadmap I’m very excited for the future. Remember, you can get started completely free with their trial of three videos. Overall, I will give Pictory two and a half stars out of five stars. I would like to see a better video generated for them to get a higher grade.

But yeah, that is my review of Pictory. I hope that you liked the video and if you did, please give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions to Pictory or other products you would like me to review, please leave a comment down below. Thank you so much for watching. Let’s catch up on the next one.