 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosali here. For today's video, I'm gonna be taking a look at a very, very cool online video editing software called FlexClip. Now just to be 100% transparent here, I am checking out the software because FlexClip wrote me an email last week and said, would you like to check out our online video editor? And I said, I would certainly like to do that. And the reason I said yes, is because I'm a huge believer in these online video editors. I think they're going to be, I imagine in 20 years time to be conservative, everyone's going to be editing their videos in the cloud. Now, if you've never used an online video editor, you might be wondering with justification, well, what's the difference between a local video editor, Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, CadenLive, whatever you're used to editing with and an online video editor. So when you use a desktop video editor, you're basically, you know, you take your clips off your camera, edit them in the video editor and then you upload to the cloud. Now with an online video editor, it's basically SaaS. It's a cloud software. The actual video editor is delivered in the cloud and you therefore need to upload your footage to the cloud first. Now, people forget that this is a big disadvantage for online video editors. And in my opinion, it's possibly the reason they haven't really become huge yet, right? Most people are still editing their videos in offline video editors, especially the more professional you get. And that's been my main criticism of these online video editors to date has been twofold. Firstly, they tend to lack the kind of power user features or the more advanced editing features and we're gonna see that when we get into this product. And the second criticism would be, well, you know, what if you have a five MBPS upload speed like I do? And let's say you come back from a shoot with 10 gigabytes of 4K footage, it's just not gonna work. You might be able to justify one upload of your rendered project, but having to upload an entire bin of footage is just gonna be way, way too slow for an editing workflow. On the plus side, however, the advantage of editing stuff in the cloud, well, there's actually a few advantages. Firstly, because it's cloud software, it lives in the cloud. That means you can start editing at home, you can move to your office, you can move to your girlfriend's apartment and log into your editing timeline from anywhere, which is pretty cool, right? It's not tied to a computer, it's not tied to a machine. Your project now lives in the cloud. The second advantage really would be rendering. Now, typically rendering, rendering's a pretty compute-intense process or these days, actually, most video rendering is GPU rendering, but CPU rendering is still a thing. So if you have a sucky computer, rendering can be a real pain in the butt, especially if you're doing 4K. These online video editors, because the compute has moved from our computer up to the cloud, often can back these online video editors with super, super fast rendering computers, a type of editing rendering workstations that would cost thousands of thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars actually to buy in real life. So that's also a big advantage. A lot of these tools can offer virtually instantaneous rendering, which is very, very cool. Final advantage of these things and we're gonna get into FlexClip after that is because we're living in the cloud when we're editing in tools like FlexClip. A lot of them offer cloud to cloud publishing. If we have our video on FlexClip and we want to publish to YouTube, we can move across the cloud. And typically when you're uploading from one cloud service to the next cloud service, it's gonna be far quicker than uploading from your computer to any cloud. The reason for that is that it's technical reason. Cloud services are closer to the backbone of the internet. They tend to have much better, much stronger internet connectivity than your average home user. So one of the nice features of FlexClip is the ability to publish to YouTube. All that intro aside, let's go and check out FlexClip and see how good or how bad it is. Now, as I mentioned, FlexClip wrote to me, they hooked me up with a free business account for the purpose of this review. However, FlexClip haven't paid me for this review. And these are my own nitpicky opinions about it. So it's totally honest here. So this is the first screen you get to. Now, the first thing I must admit, I wasn't blown away with was the feeling that this is really for kind of template videos. So you know those YouTube videos where it's like 10 best tortillas or like these kind of like spammy accounts that churn out all of these listicle videos? My first feeling was, well, it's really intended for this because the first screen is actually the template screen, right? You say, do you want to use this template, that template, or another template? Now, I'm interested in doing this for editing videos from scratch. The point in time when I'm going to go from editing videos on my computer to editing videos in the cloud personally is when my bandwidth is good enough that that upload lag I mentioned is not an issue. And when the cloud editors are powerful enough, that has got all the features. I'm not so interested in templates, a little bit stock video. And just to show you guys their stock video library, I can search by category, let's go into business and I can get these stock video clips. I have no idea if they're integrating someone else's library. I doubt it's their own stock. As you can see the resolution here is 720p. And if I click use video, it'll jump me into the timeline. That's rarely the type of workflow that would make sense to me. I almost never say, let's start from a stock footage. It's more like I want a bit of stock in my timeline. So I'm gonna look a little bit at if you can bring in stock that way. But if you want to start from stock, I don't know why, but again, if you're maybe making these more social media style videos, you can browse the stock library and start from that point forwards. And the cloud storage, it's 100 gigs is what it's showing here is my allocation. Now the thing about these cloud storage libraries is once you upload to the cloud, it's gonna stick there. So 100 gigs is really, really not bad actually, right? If you're smart about it, upload your stuff to the cloud, render out from the cloud and then delete all those files that you've left in the cloud. And if you do that workflow, make sure to back up those videos if you need to back them up, but you're never gonna blow through that 100 gigs. So it's really not bad actually. Finally, you've got a my fonts editor which is a little bit more advanced. You can upload your own fonts to the cloud. So there you go. Start from scratch. Now, let's actually get to the medium bones of this tool which is of course editing. Now, when I click on edit mode, when I click on start from scratch, it says, do you wanna do a timeline video? Do you wanna do a storyboard video? And what aspect ratio do you want? This is a nice feature. For YouTube, the standard aspect ratio is 16 to nine, but vertical video is becoming a big thing if you're distributing via Facebook, Instagram, you know, more mobile oriented platforms, you might wanna use that nine to 16 aspect ratio or one of these other ones. You also support one to one, four to five and 21 to nine, which is a cinematic aspect ratio. You might see music videos where those lines are added so that it can show up in a 16 to nine display. So I'm gonna stick with my 16 to nine and I'm going to go for timeline mode because I want to replicate an offline video editor as best as possible. Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm gonna just throw at it like a little bit of video from my last video project I did out of the house, which was I went into the old city of Jerusalem, I bought some hummus, I bought some coffee. So I'm gonna just like throw in the first 10 clips in that video library and let's see how that goes from there. Okay, I'm in my video library from my hummus eating expedition and I'm going to totally randomly import from 2,900 to 2,910 Actually, I'm gonna skip that last clip because it's gonna slow things down because it's 74 megabytes. You can see the biggest file is 17 megs, sorry, it's 20 megs. So they're short, they're gonna be short little clips but just easy to kind of demo with. Now, the first thing that really impressed me and I've edited a few videos in this so far just to get a handle on the features is do you see the fact those thumbnails like generated like instantaneously? I don't know how that's happening, but it's very impressive. It didn't happen in other cloud editors I used. Now, I'm just gonna like throw together a very random timeline. There's a bit of black on my timeline, I'll talk about that in a second just to show you guys what we're gonna do for this mock video. This is a kind of bureau style shot of the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, old city. I'm going to drag and drop and it's a drag and drop functionality. I'm gonna drag and drop that guy onto my timeline. Then I went to a coffee place but before the coffee place, before the coffee place, you know what, let's just do a stick with the coffee place. Here's the coffee place's signage. Here is the coffee menu. And then there's this. Now, I'm gonna be super nitpicky because that's just unfortunately the kind of person I am. I don't have like a lot of clarity on where what's going on at the moment was the upload process, right? So I'm obviously in the process of uploading these local files to the cloud and because my internet is slow, that's taking a while. I can see this little syncing animation going on but I don't really know like exactly where we are and I don't know what's uploading. I can kind of see this progress bar coming in on this clip. So I assume that's what it's working on and as it finishes with this, we're gonna jump to the next clip but I would appreciate if this were a bit more granular. If it said, well, we are 40% done, this is the current clip uploading rather than me having to kind of look out for these progress bars on the thumbnails. I told you guys there's gonna be nitpicky but no big deal. Now, I tried earlier, I uploaded a video footage with a WAV file for audio, an MP3 file and a few JPEGs and PNGs, static images and these automatically sorted into these folders, right? We've got videos, photos and audio. So that's a really nice feature and I have to be honest to give you guys a spoiler alert. Overall, I'm quite positive about this video editor. I'm gonna find a few nitpicky things to critique it about. It's pretty decent. It sees touches that are quite nice. Now, one other cool functionality is there is this recording tab you may see, record screen or webcam. It brings you to this functionality that kind of looks a bit like Loom, the video sharing platform that's becoming more popular. You can either record directly in the browser your webcam, just your screen or your screen on your webcam. Now, I don't think I can do it while I'm recording my webcam into OBS. So I'm not gonna show this feature as it works but it does work nicely. The one feature I wish was more clear was recording audio. There is this little audio button and that's where you go to record your voice and it says press and hold to do the recording. Now it's supposed to be capturing my voice from the microphone and I'm gonna just release that and the last time I did this, I actually didn't really see where that audio clip wound up. It does say saving periodically so it looks like something's happening in the cloud and we're getting that syncing process going on again. So that might actually be my audio clip syncing up to the cloud. I didn't try that feature last time. Now let's look at the timeline here. The timelines at the bottom as you'd expect and by default they add this little bit of black at the start of the clip. Now something I wish was a tiny bit easier was a fade to black. The way you have to do it is you have to have black then you fade into the clip. Now the way you select transitions on this is by clicking on the transitions icon and then you get the various transitions starting with the fade. So let's say for my video, right, I want to fade into this Bureau shot at Damascus gate. Now we saw at the start of this clip there was a whole, it actually only stabilizes somewhat about here. Now trimming is super easy. You can see I'm now trimming this clip on my timeline and I'm going to stop the trim here and if I start this video again, okay, the black's a bit too long. We did fade into black so I can reduce the black at the start of the video. Now the black is less long and we're fading into Damascus gate. Now clicking on the transition icon I can actually go more granular. The duration of my fade is 0.8 which is long as possible. I thought it was a bit too slow. So let's go to 0.4 seconds or 400 milliseconds and let's now take another look at this guy and that fades a little bit quicker, a little bit snappier and then we're going to go to clip of the coffee shop. Click of the coffee shop's menu. This is going to be our little mock video project and then clip of and again we're going to have some jerkiness. So let's just end up this video with like one or two seconds here and then fade out to black at the end of that video. So that's our little 10 second video project, let's say. Now to reorganize clips on the timeline if I want to put five before four it's just drag and drop so it's super, super intuitive as I mentioned there. If I click on add audio, I can work with the audio. I can add audio from my local computer but there's going to be, there's audio in these clips. Now that's something I wasn't so keen on is I can see the videos on my timeline but I don't actually get the audio waveforms. Now something, let's go into the actual options here and I'm going to try and make this review in not like 30 minutes but just to really show as many features as might be interesting to you. They do have some features for editing the clips directly in the cloud. The first one is a zoom toggle. I can start from 100% and make it smaller. So you can do kind of a transform effect here if I brought this down to let's say, you know, a 40 and I wanted to do four videos I can actually toggle this way I'm going to go back to fist and I'm going to go back to okay. Now in transform I can horizontally flip the video clip or vertically flip the video clip. So this now is nonsensical but it's literally at the click of a button you can do this and all these changes you're making on your timeline are being saved and will be preserved in the render. More perhaps usefully they have these filter options. So this is where it gets again these kind of online video editing platforms tend to feel a little bit sort of like Instagram like they're kind of putting the emphasis on those easy creating options and less on the kind of power functionalities but I do get a bunch of these kind of filters and as you can see, I'm applying them onto my video and just to be clear, we're not applying filters to a frame or a clip. We're applying it to the whole clip, sorry. So let's now go scrub through the timeline we're going to get our black entry and now this whole clip and the really cool thing is that these changes seem to apply like instantly I just clicked on that filter and boom may only be a three second clip but that already has the filter added to it so that's quite impressive. In order to get rid of the filter I just need to like repeat the process, clip, filter and then click on none. Now those kind of pre-baked filters are probably not what a lot of more advanced video editors want to use, you'd want to actually do your own you know, find adjustments to contrast, brightness. So this is, this provides some of those functionalities. Now it's not going to be a substitute for professional color grading and color correction but if you just want to make kind of like high level adjustments to the image you can do this. Now the disadvantage to these online video editors as I've mentioned now a few times what happened if I want to key frame the contrast or brightness, right? You can't do that, it's just on a clip by clip basis. So it's those kind of more advanced things that you're not going to see in them but if I wanted to play around with the color temperature here you can see I'm going to all the way down to minus 100. I can play around with the tint so kind of making changes to the white balance a little bit, contrast, exposure, brightness and saturation and of course if I crank saturation all the way back the other direction we're going to get like black and white imagery and these all apply instantly and now let's have a black and white clip of the Damascus gate then going into the coffee shop, so on and so forth. Now speed, we have a speed toggle it goes down to 0.2 and it goes up to seven times or sorry, eight times. So I can do slow-mo if I do this at like 0.5 now I shot this stuff at 25 frames per second so it's not going to look good at slow-motion and you can see it looks kind of crappy but you can do that. Now one thing you can do again the more advanced stuff is speed ramping I can't key frame in speed changes and ramp up or ramp down in the speeds but you know, better than nothing and if I want to make those fine adjustments to the trim I can do them here as well. So that's the kind of core of this product is the, just to reiterate my feelings as a timeline editor it's very, very intuitive it's very simple, it's drag and drop you can add text overlays here so if I want to add a title and now we've got an overlay layer and I can say this place called I'll back a coffee but if I want to add this little overlay add the text here I can go I'll back a coffee old city and then I can drag and drop and I can play around with all these things I can have it on a yellow background instead of a black background I can have the text you get me so these are quite nice but again we're looking at kind of less granular adjustments in terms of applying it to the lengths of the clip we can also like do a little bit of there we go a little bit of curtailing here so you can see that comes up now they have lower thirds as well which is super cool these are templates for lower thirds so if I wanted to have a clip myself speaking and I said Daniel Rossell and instead of marketing director I'm not sure how I can change that actually but there's for sure a way to get into there we go and I can say YouTube channel host right that can come in and to be honest that's really useful I'm always designing new lower thirds in GIMP and I've got a couple made up on Fiverr and so again when you're looking at the cost of these online video editing platforms factor in the cost saved on all these little jobs like outsourcing graphic design getting a lower third animation done up by someone external so they really put quite a lot of tools now in terms of media now I'm not going to bother trying to figure this out I couldn't see how to integrate stock video so to me where that stock hook would be so much more useful would be the stock library should be integrated with the media project bin but it doesn't seem to be so I'm not quite sure if I wanted to get a stock video from that library at access to you how I'd go about actually doing that now there's other little things there is a background stock effect so you can kind of have a little bit of background and then you can of course combine these so if I wanted to have this kind of generic tech background then you can see it's actually an animated background and I can have a few seconds of that and we can do a text overlay finally elements we have shapes and social callouts so we can have let's say a YouTube icon and let's pair that with a bit of text I'm just going to put myself small so you can see what I've done here the YouTube icon, a bit of text saying basic text saying subscribe for more videos super generic call to action subscribe for more videos make this guy a bit smaller centered and YouTube so you can see these kind of work well together so let's just go back to our preview subscribe for more videos oh and that's even an animated element that's super cool and then we can just like fade out so the way to do a fade to black is to add a bit of black, transition, fade and we can do our fade out boom perfect so that's my little random video project now let's take a look at the exporting so as you'd expect there is an export button and I can render depending on what tier you're subscribing to at various resolutions so as I'm on their top tier for my free trial account I'm going to go for 1080p and then click on the export button okay so we're now rendering the video now I remember I said at the start of this video that like rendering one of the advantages of these cloud platforms is really quick rendering so this is not super fast rendering it's two minutes left on I think my video is going to be like one minute I think and it's actually slower than rendering on my local computer so not as quick they might be pulling these those animated elements live in from the cloud that's all I can think of that might explain the delay as you're rendering you do get a share link and you can choose share settings and you get an embed code so even as you're waiting for your video project to render out you can already start getting start getting to work on it and the very very big deal is we have three different cloud services we can integrate with to do cloud to cloud pushes of your content the most important one of course is YouTube so I'm not going to integrate FlexiClip with my YouTube channel the one you're watching this on because I don't want to undo it but if you're using this regularly you could use that YouTube functionality to share your video to social as you can see you've only got one minute left I'm going to pause my review video here give it a minute and then see how our finished video turned out okay abracababra and the magic has happened it's exported successfully download the video option again and it's given me my mp4 file here moment of truth okay fade in Damascus Gate in black this definitely looks like 1080p footage cut to this very random and nonsensical lower third over the coffee shop footage and pan up on the coffee menu and then we're going to have the three seconds here then we're going to fade out to black ah animation subscribe for more videos YouTube and fade out to black so it worked overall impressions about FlexClip as I said if you're an advanced video editor you're doing a lot of stuff like speed ramping drone footage you want to super color grade your footage in very, very advanced ways this is probably not the right tool but then again I actually haven't yet found an online video editor that has that kind of equivalent of DaVinci in the cloud I tried a couple more online video editors I actually really, really like FlexClip the editing timeline was missing a couple of things in my opinion I would like to see audio being being more editable waveforms and stuff like that I'd like to see be more intuitive to overdub audio and video clips but overall those are really kind of like nitty gritty criticisms I was quite impressed quite impressed by this I think if you have a good upload speed and you liked the idea of editing the cloud and you're happy to pay a subscription for that don't think of it as wasted money to pay a subscription for an online video editor when you can get a video editor on your computer for free and again I'm not being paid by FlexClip I'm not pushing an affiliate link just my opinion when you actually think about it there are definite advantages that you're getting quite a lot of value for that spend in terms of being able to store your projects in the cloud definitely makes collaboration easier a bunch of pre-baked animations and text and stock video just to kind of spruce up the production value of your videos overall honestly not a bad package and the integration with YouTube Dropbox and Drive is a really really nice added extra but especially the YouTube integration being able to click on that and publish straight up to YouTube is really useful I've done it before and it works well thank you guys for watching this YouTube video hope it was interesting if you are looking to buy FlexClip subscription if you want to get more video content from me feel free to subscribe to this YouTube channel thank you very much for watching