Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

My Verdict on 10 Popular Shortform Video Editing Tools

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 368

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Are you ready to unlock the secrets of creating short-form videos that captivate and engage?

Today's episode is dedicated to the game-changing world of short form video editing. In this episode, I'll be sharing my hands-on experience with ten different video editing tools and revealing the standout performer—Opus Clip. We'll dive into its features, from auto framing and text editing to its AI-generated content capabilities, and how it has transformed my content strategy, allowing me to churn out high-quality videos for YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, and TikTok with minimal effort.

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Speaker 1:

Short form video. You know you have to do it, but you're not sure how to get started. I was in the exact same point, but over the weekend I had some free time and I successfully, using one tool, was able to create about two dozen short form videos, which now I can drip feed over the various socials for the next few weeks. How did I do it, how do I recommend you do it, and what other advice can I offer you for short form video? Well, that's going to be the topic of today's episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktoking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, neil Schaefer here, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 368 of this podcast. Before we get to short form video, I always like to share a little bit of what I am following in the news in hopes that it is helpful to you. I think the biggest news over the past week was the Surgeon General, no less, of the United States, who is normally focused on medical issues, literally said that he wants to propose a social media warning label for kids, saying that social media can harm kids. Now I believe this is sort of unprecedented, because when you think of the surgeon general warnings, it's like you know, cigarettes or nicotine causes cancer, what have you? So I think we all agree that, with COVID especially, there have been a lot of different mental health issues in societies around the world, and social media generates a new challenge. But you know, my take is TV also generated a challenge, and when I see kids spending time hours in a day on TikTok, I remember us spending hours a day on TV or, later on, hours a day playing games. You could say that games, or video games equally, are detrimental to one's mental health, especially for your child. Yet there are no restrictions on that. So you know, together with the proposed TikTok ban.

Speaker 1:

I don't know what's going to happen. Obviously, I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I don't think it's going to change. Obviously, I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I don't think it's going to change anything immediately. But I do think that social media platforms are going to have to be more cognizant of this and maybe consider how they can adjust their functionality or their auditing, their censorship or non-censorship, to be able to abide by this. So I don't foresee any big changes in the near future. Like I said, don't lose sleep about it.

Speaker 1:

Also now, I've been experimenting a lot with Instagram threads of recent and I finally am starting to see some traffic actually come to my website from threads, which is more than I would ever get from Instagram. It's still very, very early, but it's really good news to see that they finally launched an API for developers. So basically, without an API, you cannot use third-party social media scheduling tools unless you use the universal posting method, where you get a notification on your app and then you copy and paste, which is how I do posting the threads currently with SocialBee. But now that they launched the API, there will be more and more support for threads on various dashboards that you use, and I think that's going to be good news. It'll allow you to more easily engage on threads. Is your audience on threads? I don't know. I think that I consider threads a subset of what Twitter was, and Twitter is a subset of what it was as well. So you add Twitter and threads together. You still do not get what Twitter was, but you also have this Instagram connection and you also sometimes in the Instagram feed they're pushing threads. So it'll be interesting to see how it develops. I am spending more time on it and I'm looking forward to what happens there.

Speaker 1:

Another interesting report in the news is I like to go to marketingchartscom. They offer a lot of analysis and data points really on what is going on in the world of marketing. So they found in the latest report this should be no surprise that TikTok, instagram and Snapchat in other words, millennials and primarily Gen Z and I think it's called Gen Alpha, the next generation after Gen Z are using these platforms for product information, news and we've always known messaging. But TikTok has seen a 102% rise in users seeking product info and an 89% increase in those using it for news. Now, this actually was measured from Q4 2020 to Q4 2023. But generations change. The way that we consume media changes. The vibe that people want from a brand, from a website, from a social media presence changes quite rapidly these days. So even if you don't think your audience is on TikTok, I do encourage you to at least download the app. You don't have to post anything, you don't have to connect it to your phone book, but at least look at what other people in your industry are talking about.

Speaker 1:

I am finding, okay, I am going to talk about short form video and I've already started to experiment with this. So, to give you an idea, I am sharing short form video across various platforms, but the three most strategic, if you think about it, for short form video are going to be YouTube shorts, instagram reels and Tik TOK. I still share to X, to LinkedIn, to Facebook. I think video is always a good thing to share. The algorithms love it Keeps people on your profile longer. It's a win winwin, right. If I go over the last few YouTube shorts versus Instagram Reels, versus TikTok videos and these are pretty much the same videos. They're all published on different days of the week and different times, but it's the same content If I look on YouTube right now my last six videos I'm getting between 10 and 43 views.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so YouTube shorts 10 to 43 views. On Instagram my last five videos I'm getting between 289 and 638 views. And if I go to TikTok, though, I'm getting between 541 and 1,544 views. So definitely seeing more traction in TikTok, believe it or not. And it raises the question you know you have a target audience. Maybe a smaller percentage of that target audience are on TikTok than other platforms, and TikTok is growing older as we speak, by the way, but all it takes is a passionate small percent of those one point, whatever billion users to be attracted to your content for you to be able to really get traction. So I share those numbers just to encourage you that it's not too late to get into this and you really should take it more seriously.

Speaker 1:

And this is a great way to lead into short form video what I want to talk about today. But before I do that, just a quick update. I've been reaching out to a number of authors and influencers and I've shared some of them on this podcast to give their blessing for my new book, and the deadline for receiving those was last night, so today I will be working on finalizing the interior copy with this advanced praise information, which is also going to help me choose which of those go on the back potentially front cover and then finalize the back cover and then I can move forward in the actual production of the book. I am also expecting my final Kickstarter images to come back today, so this week is when things finally start to go into motion. So, yeah, be on the lookout for the new book. I know it's been a long process, but hey, there's a lot of moving parts.

Speaker 1:

So let's get into the topic of short form videos. As I said, I had some downtime and I have worked with various companies and various people on Fiverr and Upwork to try to do short form video. You know, we know, that this is a major type of content consumption. It is the number one on many networks and probably anywhere. Video is going to be supreme and it's the short videos that seem to be the most popular. I think any company has to have short form video as part of their social media marketing today. It is part of modern marketing, right? So, obviously, you know, I have a B2B product. It's just information, it's education, and when I look at my sources of videos, I realized that there's three different types. I have solo videos that I do on YouTube, educational videos Sometimes I do webinars what have you but I have these solo pieces. I also have my digital first mastermind and, by sharing selected snippets with the approval of my members, it helps educate, but it also helps promote that mastermind group right.

Speaker 1:

The other one are the podcast interviews that I do, and I'm interviewing some pretty amazing thought leaders. Right, I'm just looking at my schedule for the next few weeks, but you know I'll be interviewing Dennis Yu shortly, john Jantz, duct Tape Marketing, amy Woods, content 10X, andy Lambert, social 3.0 author and also product manager over at Adobe. And there's going to be some amazing people on my podcast and people that I've interviewed recently Dave Kirpin and Robert Rose. So there's some pretty amazing content that is being recorded. So my thought was that let me start with this podcast interview content, let me start to get some data right Of which of this content is going to perform best. But let me start with the interview and let me just dive headfirst into using one of these short form video tools, and I want to give you this advice Maybe you're already using a tool, maybe you're just starting out, but I want to make sure that you do it the right way and also understand things that you might need to adjust to best do it. So this now brings into light a process I have for selecting tools.

Speaker 1:

If you've been a follower of my blog, neilschafercom, I write a lot of listicle posts on different types of tools for digital marketing, and this has always been part of my DNA because, for those that remember, I was the co-founder of the Social Tools Summit, which just focused on social media marketing technology back in 2014, 2015. Man, it's been 10 years. Time flies. Regardless, I've always been fascinated by technology. I've always known that it is critical to success and therefore I've always paid really, really close attention to it. So when I write these blog posts, for a lot of them they're R&D.

Speaker 1:

Right, I'm not a regular user of this type of tool, but I know it's important and I want to do a little bit more research and try to gauge it. Who are the leading players in the field? That is sort of the first thing, right? If you just do a Google search for repurposing video, you don't know if the results especially if they're from sponsored ads you don't know if they're the leading companies or not. In fact, how do you know? It's really really hard to understand, but this is what I do.

Speaker 1:

I might go through 50 to 100, depending on the keyword but I will then start to look at not only what are the companies that are ranking organically I don't pay attention to the paid but I also look at what are the tools that are being featured in other listicles. Now, I don't do this, but a lot of bloggers that write listicles will focus only on tools that have affiliate marketing programs, because that's their ROI is. They want to provide the listicle so that you click through and you end up generating affiliate commission for them. In all honesty and transparency, I do that when there is a tool that I mentioned that I'm also an affiliate for. I think that's just a natural thing to do, but I don't let it decide on which tools go into that list, because that would be not fair to you and it really wouldn't represent the best choices that are out there. So I do look, though, at what tools are being featured on other lists, and the other thing I look at is I will look at the domain rating of those tools that come up in the organic search results, and the reason is and I use the Ahrefs tool it's a free tool where you can get a zero to 100 check on the domain rating for any company.

Speaker 1:

If you're an SEO, you probably use a tool. I mean Moz, semrush. They all have their own algorithms to determine a number, but it's usually between zero and 100. And the importance of this number is that, generally speaking, the higher the number, the better the SEO, generally speaking, right. What that means, though, is not just that it appears in a lot of search engine rankings for different keywords. That is definitely part of it, but another part of it is how long that website's been around, and another part of it, which I think is even more important, is the amount and quality of backlinks that it receives. So if you're a new company with new technology that hasn't been tested, you're going to have a low domain authority, and you're probably going to have very few backlinks, and the lifespan of your website is going to be very short.

Speaker 1:

So what, analyzing the domain authority of these tools, companies? What it offers you is the ability to say who is well-established in the market and who is an upstart. Right, because you can't, like you know, you're not going to test out 50 different tools. That's just crazy, so I always focus on the number 10 or 15. So what are going to be like? The top 10 or 15 that rise above everybody else that are going to be fairly safe bets to use?

Speaker 1:

So for this purpose, I began to use a tool called Opus Clip. Now I do have an affiliate link for this tool, which, if you listened to my podcast episode where I brought home the takeaways of that conference, opus Clip was the number one tool being talked about for video repurposing. A former Instagram executive and I'm forgetting his name right now, but he has also spoke at VidSummit the last two times. He's become a strategic advisor for Opus Clip and someone that I have immense respect for, roberto Blake, someone I have immense respect for also mentions Opus Clip as his tool, so I knew that it was sort of the default tool that everybody was using.

Speaker 1:

So I started out using Opus Clip right, and I'm going to get into details of how I use it. But before I mention that, opus Clip basically allows you to take a link. So I would add a link of the YouTube live stream that I did and within you know, 30 minutes, it would take an hour video and basically, it recommended 30 different short form videos, anywhere from 15 seconds to two minutes and 30 seconds. Right, that's a lot of content to go through, but it also speaks to the power of AI and video and this tool particularly, and I spent a lot of time going through you know, first of all, which are the ones that I want to keep and then, of the ones that I want to keep, do I need to add text before and after? There's a number of things B-roll, a number of things that you can do with the tool, which is awesome, but it also has a social media scheduler. So I found myself creating the video using their social media scheduler and I, you know, over the course of two days, over the weekend, I literally had, I think, 25 videos scheduled from two different YouTube videos. That I did.

Speaker 1:

But when I went in the next day, to my surprise, there was a glitch and the glitch basically said I'm going to try to find it here. The glitch basically said it could not preview the video anymore and it said please check your original source. In other words, I had to go back in and re-edit those videos and it made me question is Opus Clip ready for prime time right. So I'm going to get to what I recommend you do if you want to use it, because I wasted a lot of time that I don't want you to waste. But I also want you to know, and I think by describing or comparing Opus Clip to some of the other tools, you get a feeling as to why I recommend it. So after that happened on Sunday, it's like okay, maybe it's not Opus Clip right, maybe there are other tools that are better. I'm going to go check them out and I want to share with you what I found, because maybe you're using one of these other tools or you've heard of them, but this is what I find today. So a tool called CLAP, k-l-a-p. Dude. I couldn't even register on the platform because the email verification that was required. The email got sent out like six hours after I registered, so there was obviously a glitch in their system. But if I have to wait six hours to get a email verification in order to become a new user, that is not the platform for me, so that was immediately out of the question.

Speaker 1:

A Pictoryai is a pretty good platform, but Pictory. The issue with them is they did not have auto framing. So what auto framing is if you ever watch a live stream video that I do I like to change up the angles, so sometimes it'll be my guest covering the entire screen and sometimes it'll be me and my guest covering 50% of the screen each. And what auto framing does is when the video clips are created using AI, it actually makes sure that it automatically will just have one person in the frame or two people in the frame, and it's automatically centered. It is a critical technology that if you don't have it's going to require you a lot of time for each video to go in and manually frame. So the fact that Pictory did not have AutoFraming at least not that I could tell right Immediately no.

Speaker 1:

Another one was Video V-I-D-Y-O Looked like a great tool, but the free trial for like seven days or whatever it is it did not allow me to test out the auto-framing, and the auto-framing requires a $50 a month investment. So another reason why I'm going to recommend you go to neilschafercom slash Opus now is that I was able to subscribe at a $20 a month program. Video begins at $50 a month. So not only is Opus the best tool, but right now it's the cheapest and, as I've seen from Jasper and phrase and all these other tools. Over time, as they get bigger in the market, they do increase their prices. So another reason why I recommend at $20 a month. It is a no brainer investment up to like five hours of video. It's crazy. I've uploaded three interviews and I still have three hours and 43 minutes left. Maybe it's six hours of video, I forget, but anyway you get the picture.

Speaker 1:

Let me go through some of these other tools so that you can see the issues. Captionsai, I could not log in with email address. I was forced to use like, either Google or Apple or Facebook. And it's like you know what, if I can't use my email address and if I need a VA or someone in the future to log into my account using email, I can't use this tool. So that's out of the picture. Flexclip Flexclip looked like a great tool, but you cannot import a YouTube video. Clip looked like a great tool, but you cannot import a YouTube video. So I don't want to have to sit there waiting an hour to upload a two gig video or whatever it is. That's a no-go. Submagic is another interesting tool. Once again, cannot import YouTube video. I think that's a critical component. Exemplary, so exemplaryai.

Speaker 1:

And as we get to the bottom here, these were the more interesting tools that I think deserve a little bit more attention. One thing is that auto-framing they call it motion tracking they're very transparent, saying this is still in development. The other one is that, let's say, the AI picks a video, but AI is not perfect and sometimes you want to add a little bit context by adding a little bit of text before what the clip decided on, right? You want to add a little bit before or maybe add a little bit after. You cannot do that in exemplary. You can only edit or delete the current text from the transcript that it's chosen. So that's a no-go.

Speaker 1:

And exemplary was the only one who reached out to me and asked for my feedback and I said this is my feedback, okay. Another one was Goldcast. So Goldcast looked really good, but the presets for Goldcast was horizontal, right. So the whole idea of repurposing videos for short form. Yet it seemed like for every video I would have to go in and change the setting from horizontal to vertical. It's vertical first, right. So immediately I realized that you know, maybe it's a horizontal video editing company that's trying to get into short form video repurposing. I don't know. That was a no-go. And then we have two more left right.

Speaker 1:

So Munch was another tool that I heard about at VidSummit that had a lot of hope for, but Munch took a long time to process a video. By far, out of all these tools, it took the longest. It also the text in order to put text on the screen for you know the captions. It seemed like it had a lot of functionality, yet it seemed like it had very few functionality. It was just not intuitive, very, very difficult to work with. The last one that I thought was you know, I would say that Munch is like third best right, with Opus clip being first. There was a startup right, so I did. This is why I look at like 10 or 15.

Speaker 1:

So, even if the domain rating was a little bit on the low side, if it looked promising, I'm going to check it out, and that is vizardai V-I-Z-A-R-D. They actually came in second, even though I really haven't heard a lot about them. They were exposed to me through a Google search. The only thing that they couldn't do of the main features that I was looking for was the ability to add text. So, once again, the AI is not perfect. You need to have a little flexibility in order to add or delete text before and after. So, basically, right.

Speaker 1:

I then went back into Opus Clip and I realized, you know, after I process a video, I'm just going to immediately download it and I'm just gonna immediately upload it to Social B in case closed, right? So that is my advice for you. The other advice is you may wanna start deleting a word here or a word there. Every time that you make a deletion, it basically makes a split in the video and if you do too many of these, then it really not only slows down the process, but it also creates some impurities in the platform. And what I've realized is that most video editors they might begin on Opus Clip, but Opus Clip gives you the ability to export as XML and then they will bring it into a more robust video editing platform that allows them to do more things.

Speaker 1:

So what I've found and just to give you a feel for my workflow, to help you visualize or, if you're already using these tools to check what you're doing what I'm doing is I'm uploading YouTube video. It's coming out with 10, 15, 30 different posts. I'm then previewing each one of those and I am immediately seeing which of the ones that I'm gonna use, right, I'm not gonna limit it. If there's 20 great ones, awesome. If there's only five great ones, awesome. You know, whatever it is, opus Clip will show it to you in descending order of its virality score, and it's going to be interesting as I test these. How accurate is that virality score? I have no idea, right, but basically, once I've decided I am going to use it, I then go into the edit screen.

Speaker 1:

Now, once I'm in the edit screen, I'm going to see. You know, the first thing I'm going to see is do I need to add anything before or after? And it's really really easy to do this. There's an add a section. You could add sections in between, you know, if you really want to get into it, but it's basically you know before and after. Is there something that I should add?

Speaker 1:

Opus clip also features the ability to clear filler words or pauses, so I will immediately do this. I've found it's really accurate. It doesn't break up the flow, so immediately, you know it might take it down a second or two, or what have you. The next thing that I'm going to look at is are there any sections now that I want to cut out? Right. So I've added text, so I have the context, but I'll go through it again. Are there any sentences that just don't make sense? Or if there's a few words, I will cut those out. I will also look for misspellings. It's really really easy to correct misspellings here, so everything I just talked about is actually really quick. Then, as I see if there's anything to cut out, I'm also looking. Are there auto framing issues? Even Opus Clip is not perfect, but if there's an auto frame issue, it's really easy to basically click on the video of the person, you press crop and then you can recenter it and it will process it really quickly.

Speaker 1:

So everything I just talked about here on each video, it does not have to take you that long. It can be a few minutes. I find where the time is spent is actually in the B-roll. So the B-roll means that you watch a short form video and then it will go to like a stock video or like another video, right, and then it'll come back to the interview. I think these are really important to keep people engaged. If the stock video adds value, obviously Right.

Speaker 1:

So what's really cool is that you can generate B roll. You can generate stock B roll or you can generate AI generated B roll, which I prefer, and basically you know you wait maybe a minute or two and then it'll fill your video with various AI B-roll and then for each of the AI B-roll, if you don't like what the video is, you can go in and then re-edit the prompt and regenerate, and then you get four different options to choose from. This is where it can take time, right, and the problem is that every time you save a change, you have to go back to the main dashboard, where then it takes a minute, two minutes, three minutes for it to properly process, and you definitely want to wait for it to process that you don't run into any issues in the future. But that is basically the workflow. Once you do that, you're ready to go.

Speaker 1:

And what I really like about the sharing the post to social media, I still use that functionality. I do not share the post, but it generates, or auto generates, using AI, a title and a description. It gives me a starting point for what I can use in my own short form video, so I will then copy and paste that and then go into social be upload and then I'm done with the process. So that's the process that I've found to be the most time efficient out of all this right. As I've mentioned, I've outsourced this before.

Speaker 1:

What am I missing? The things that you miss by using Opus Pro at least I don't know how to do it. It's not very clear in the user interface is the ability to add sound effects that sometimes you see on these short form videos. The ability to manually upload your own B roll or images. So when I talk about my new book, to be able to like, have, have the book cover appear on the screen, I think those are the two big things. Additional, you know, stock video or images and then sound effects. Those are the two things that I have not been able to figure out a way to do.

Speaker 1:

But even without those two things, I think that just getting started it a way to do. But even without those two things, I think that just getting started it hits 80 to 90% of what you need and, like I said, these other nine platforms did not. In various ways, they either did not have the functionality or it was going to cost you a lot more time. So that is why I highly recommend Opus Clip if you want to get started. If you need a little handholding, let me know I might create a video of this workflow. But, yeah, I think with this, there's no excuse not to get started, unless you don't have time, in which case you can outsource this. But I do think and my experience in outsourcing this is you are the creator. It's really hard for other people to emulate the content that you would choose to generate a short form video from, and I think you're just going to be a lot more effective when you do it yourself.

Speaker 1:

So one workflow that I'm considering in order to scale this is you know, opus Clip does allow you to have team members, so go in, generate the videos, choose the ones that you want to make videos from, and then have someone on your team or someone outsourced to work on those videos, to do the B roll, to do the captions, to do all the. You know the things that might take time. That is probably the most efficient way of using it, and that's something I'm going to look in doing if I can't find a more efficient way of doing it, because, like I said, it does take time, but you are creating. You know, if you're posting three short-form videos a week, you are creating seven weeks worth of content right Through one interview or five weeks of content. So when you think of it that way, you know maybe you're spending one hour per week. That's not a lot, but if you're very busy, obviously you want to figure out a way to scale.

Speaker 1:

So this is really fresh in my mind and I just wanted to share this with you so that you understand what is possible, what isn't possible. The tools are out there, the tools I recommend, and hopefully, if you haven't been doing a lot of short form video like myself, this will sort of put you over the hump and you'll be on your way and I will say you can still record videos. You could record horizontal videos from your iPhone, right Of just you speaking. You can then upload them to a private YouTube or you know you could upload the file as well with Opus Club Don't get me wrong, but you know you could use this. You know, if you just wanted to talk or you just wanted to respond to questions, go through FAQs. You can create these short form videos to post on social media with those Alex Hermosy like captions with a little bit of AI generated B-roll, really, really easily, and that's the main takeaway here you do not have to be a podcast or have hour long YouTube interviews in order to take advantage of this. All right Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Speaker 1:

As you know, the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast switches between a solo episode of what I've been working on and a interview episode with thought leaders, authors, people that inspire me, that I think are going to inspire you. So make sure, if you haven't, you hit the subscribe button and I do publish. At the very beginning, I talked about the various news I see in my analysis. I do publish that on a weekly basis. Make sure you go to neilschafercom slash newsletter so that you can be on the list to get that information first and to be first to know when I launch the upcoming Kickstarter for my new book. All right well, that is all for another hopefully you thought was exciting edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach.

Speaker 2:

Neil Schafer signing off. You've been listening Neal Schaefer signing off 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.