Pictory Review for Easy AI Video Creation [2024]

The steady rise of Tiktok’s fame has fueled an era of declined attention span. Nowadays, everybody wants to watch 20-second videos instead of reading long posts or watching minutes-long videos. This is where Pictory comes is super helpful for content creators!

Pictory is a software that uses artificial intelligence to make engaging short videos out of long blog posts. It can create shorts from a text (i.e., a blog post), or from longer-form videos.

I’ve tried lots of different AI video tools, and I’ve found that Pictory is also amazing for creating videos automatically from blog posts – it’s super easy to do, and the videos look great (see my videos later in this article)!

Who can benefit the most from the Pictory AI video generator, and what are its best features? Find out in our detailed Pictory review!

What Is Pictory?

Pictory is an AI video generator software that can turn lengthy written content into short videos.

It saves the time and effort of extracting meaningful information from long articles and makes social media-friendly videos that can boost your traffic.

The software is cloud-based and needs the internet to function, and you can try it for free before subscribing.

Top Benefits of Pictory

Here’s a list of the top benefits that Pictory provides:

• Easy to use: It has an organized and easy-to-use interface, suitable for tech beginners and professionals.

• Customizable products: After Pictory finishes your video, you can personalize it by adding a logo, a font, and your brand’s colors.

• Convenient videos: To boost traffic and encourage more people to open the videos, Pictory automatically adds captions to all of them so that even people in noisy places can learn about the contents of the video.

• Usable from any device: Since Pictory is cloud-based, you can use it from any laptop or personal computer.

• Fast: Creating engaging videos with voiceovers, captions, and more takes only a few minutes.

• Boosts SEO: Captioned videos grab more attention and are favored by major platforms like Google, so using Pictory to make videos will boost your SEO.

Note: Make sure to use coupon code NEILCHASEFILM to get 20% off your subscription!

Best Features of Pictory

Now that we’ve given you a general idea about Pictory and its benefits, it’s time to look further into each feature and how you can use it!

Video Creation From Blog Posts

Pictory’s leading role is to create high-quality videos from lengthy blog posts. It uses AI to extract all the essential information from the written content and leave silences and filler words.

More than that, it can add AI narration or background music to the final video.

Video Creation From Scripts

Another feature of Pictory that’s famous among online course creators is its ability to create videos from written scripts. It takes a few minutes to convert the written content to visuals, and it can add high-quality narration using AI voice or your own voice.

Long Video Summarization

Pictory shines in creating videos. It can also summarize long videos into short ones that are more engaging and better suited for social media platforms.

For example, you can use it to summarize long podcasts, online conferences, Zoom videos, and more.

Video Editing Using Text

Using Pictory, you can convert videos into text and browse them by searching for keywords. This makes editing videos and removing filler words easier because you can find them in a few seconds.

Suppose you want to delete all the awkward “um”s from a video. You can write the word in the search bar, and the video generation tool will immediately highlight it and its copies.

Video Captioning

If you have ready-made videos that you don’t have time to caption, you can utilize Pictory to do so in a few minutes. It’s much faster than humans and has shocking accuracy rates. As such, you can expect professional-quality videos with clear and attractive captions.

Short Highlight Video Creation

Another of Pictory’s superb features is the ability to create short highlight videos from lengthy content. It produces high-quality, shareable video content, ideal for ranking on social media platforms because of how short the videos are.

Masterclasses and Case Studies

Aside from its technical features, Pictory provides masterclasses on its website for marketing beginners. You’ll find explanatory videos for essential topics in marketing, like content repurposing, personal brand development, video marketing strategies, and more.

The website also contains case studies from various users. Each case study gets presented in a video so that you can benefit from other users’ personal experiences.

Who Should Use Pictory?

Many people can benefit from using Pictory in their everyday work, and here’s a brief roundup of them.

• Online course creators: People who create video courses but have no time to caption or edit them can benefit significantly from Pictory. It also makes creating explanatory videos from written content a breeze, which boosts engagement rates and traffic.

• Social media marketers: The incredible videos that Pictory creates are perfect for social media because they’re short, captioned, and visually appealing. These aspects make them more attractive to the crowd, guaranteeing a successful marketing campaign on any platform.

• YouTube channel owners: If you have a YouTube channel that you need to update daily or weekly but don’t have enough time to create engaging videos, you’ll benefit from Pictory’s features. You can create many videos in a few hours and with minimum effort.

• Website owners: You can use Pictory to make introductory videos to your website content. Suppose you have a content writing online business. You can make short video clips for each service you provide and use them as a marketing method to communicate with clients.

• Online coaches: Online coaches can benefit from Pictory because it requires no video creation experience. Also, it’s more affordable than hiring a human video editor to do the job.

Pictory Pricing and Plans

Pictory offers a free trial so that you can try it before subscribing. It gives you three editing projects for videos up to 10 minutes in length. You also don’t need a credit card to start it.

Other than that, it offers three pricing plans. Here are their details.

Standard

The Standard Plan from Pictory costs $23 per month if you pay monthly and $19 per month if you pay yearly. Subscribing to it gives you the following:

• 30 videos
• 25 automatic voices
• 10 minutes of video-converted texts
• 5000 background music tracks
• 1 hour of editing existing video footage
• 10 hours of transcribing video content
• Three customizable branded templates

This plan is best suited for beginner video creators who don’t need to generate a lot of videos in a short period.

Premium

The Premium Plan from Pictory costs $47 per month if you pay monthly and $39 per month if you pay yearly. Its features include but aren’t limited to:

• 60 videos
• 42 automatic voices
• 20 minutes of video-converted texts
• 15000 music tracks
• 3 hours of editing existing videos
• 20 hours of transcribing videos
• 10 customizable branded templates
• Access to millions of stock videos and images

This plan is best suited for marketing agencies, website owners, online course creators, and people with experience in video marketing. It might not be enough for major corporate businesses, and it’s too much for beginners and hobbyists.

The Standard and the Premium plans have free trials.

Enterprise

The Enterprise Plan’s price isn’t mentioned on Pictory’s website. You’ll have to contact their customer service for more information. The plan’s features are customizable, and you can discuss these with Pictory’s team.

In addition to the basic features, this plan offers an experienced account manager to help you run your business.

To pay for any of Pictory’s plans, you’ll need a major credit or debit card. They also accept PayPal and alternative payments you can agree on after contacting customer service.

Pictory Review: Pros and Cons

Like any other tool on the internet, Pictory has both its pros and cons. Here’s a brief roundup to help you decide before subscribing to it.

Pictory is suitable for all marketing fields, making it a favorite for many people.

But, if you think any of the cons will affect your video-creating experience too much, look at the Pictory alternatives listed below.

Pictory Alternatives

Pictory is one of many video-generating tools on the market. It has many alternatives that are equally competent and worth considering. Here’s a quick list of them:

InVideo

Invideo is one of the most straightforward video tools with its drag-and-drop interface, diverse languages, high-quality media stock, and customizable templates.

You can check out my full review of invideo here: Invideo Review: An Easy-to-Use AI Video Generator.

FlexClip

Flexclip is a free video maker tool that you can use for professional or personal use. While not as feature-packed and automatic as Pictory, its price makes it appealing to many beginners.

Lumen5

Lumen5 creates videos from texts and gives you customizable templates to attract your audience. It also uses a drag-and-drop technology that’s easy to use, even for beginners.

My Experience with Pictory

Pictory let me use my Google account to start a free 2-week trial. It was easy to sign up with no downloads necessary to get started.

The beginning interface was pretty straightforward and let you choose between four different categories to get your video started.

‘Script to Video’ and ‘Article to Video’ let you turn text documents and blogs into videos with captions, b-roll, and voiceover if you’d like.

‘Edit Video using Text’ lets you customize pre-existing videos and even can use AI to trim down a long video into a shorter format better for social media clips.

Finally, ‘Visuals to Video’ creates a video slideshow using your chosen images. 

I played around with each category, and they all basically turned into the same video structure in the end. So, for demonstration purposes, I continued using ‘Edit Video using Text’ with their provided demo video.

After uploading or importing your full-length video, Pictory creates dialogue transcripts. On the right, under the video, you can see the full-length video is 3 minutes and 53 seconds. To use AI to trim the video down, click ‘Auto highlight’ and choose how much you want to trim down to – I chose 25%.

This trims the entire video down into only 1 minute and 20 seconds, showing the green highlighted text as the dialogue it decided to keep in.

It seemed like the AI was pretty decent at trimming the video down, but some of the highlights it chose to keep didn’t make sense within the shorter story. You can alter which parts of the video to keep by highlighting sentences and adding them as a highlight or removing them as a highlight.

You could also change the aspect ratio of the video between landscape, portrait, and square. I thought this was pretty cool as it automatically changed the sizing of the captions as well. 

And in the ‘Templates Library’ folder below the video, you could also choose between many different styles of captions for your video.

From here, you can download your video now, or click on ‘Customize highlights video’ to customize the video even further.

Once you go into ‘Customize,’ Pictory creates mini scenes out of the captions and gives you many different tools to further edit your video as you can see on the left-hand column: Story, Visuals, Audio, Text, Elements, Styles, Branding and Format.

The ‘Story’ page lets you edit the captions in each scene and easily allows you to add transitions between each separate highlight.

The ‘Visuals’ page lets you search different keywords for stock footage to add to your video. You can also add solid background colors and animated graphic backgrounds or upload your own background to stick on a scene.

While the b-roll options were a little stale, I thought they were decent enough for a quick video to post online. And you can always upload your own if you have access to a better stock footage site, so that’s a plus!

The ‘Audio’ page lets you sort through their stock music and has some cool filters to help you like Mood, Purpose, Genre, Duration, etc. 

You can also add AI voiceover if you have a transcript for your video without any dialogue, like if you were turning a blog post into a video. This is definitely a unique feature!

The ‘Text’ page allows you to add text to any of the scenes and even lets you animate the text in, choose your font, sizing, and color.

’Elements’ provides tons of emojis, gifs, and stickers you can add to the video with the click of a button.

’Styles’ gives you a more holistic view of the different template library options you can choose for your captions, as well as the style of text you want for your Intro and Outro.

The ‘Branding’ page gave you options to create an intro and outro if you’d like to use one, along with different text, backgrounds, logos, etc. This was a fairly simple way to add a bit more professionalism to your video with a clear intro and outro.

Finally, there was the ‘Format’ page which let you change the aspect ratio. This seemed a little redundant as there was almost always an option to choose the format above the video on every other page. 

Once you’re done customizing your video, you can click the ‘Download’ button and you’re ready to go! 

While Pictory was super straightforward and easy to use, as a pro video editor, I felt like it lacked some features that I would’ve liked to use. For instance, when you trim down the long video there are a lot of jump cuts and I would’ve liked to zoom in on the video after the cut to avoid such a distracting jump cut, but there was no option to do that. 

Also for the music behind the video, I would’ve liked the option to choose which portion of the song to use instead of having to start the song at the beginning. 

There was also no real way to scrub through the video as you customize it since it would only play one scene at a time. 

Overall, I thought Pictory was a very beginner-friendly platform with decent AI capabilities. If you’re looking to create lots of content quickly, or you want to take your existing video content and turn it into shorts, then Pictory can be a great option for you.

But if you’re trying to create professional video content for clients, then I would hold out for a more advanced editing software (try invideo or Adobe Premiere Pro).

Here’s a video walking you through how to use Pictory for AI video editing!

Videos I’ve Created Using Pictory

Here are a few videos that I’ve created recently using Pictory. I love using my own images (made in Canva) inside the videos, to make them more my own. Stock video footage is great, but it’s nice to use some personalized images as well!

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts of Pictory in the comments below!

Who Created Pictory?

Pictory was founded by a team of three: Vikram, Vishal, and Abid. Vikram is an entrepreneur and the co-founder of a software company called Winshuttle. Vishal is a technology leader and also the co-founder of Winshuttle. As for Abid, he’s a growth strategy leader with experience in customer service and product management.

The three of them have experience in prolific content creation. They saw a gap in the market for an AI video editor for short-form content.

While many content creators focus heavily on written content, customers are looking for visual and interactive content, like short videos. So, they developed a cloud-based tool to help close the gap.

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Final Thoughts

Now that you have all the information you need about the video generation tool, should you buy Pictory?

I recommend you buy Pictory if you need to generate many videos in a short period of time. It’s incredibly beneficial for YouTube channel owners, influencers, and bloggers. Really, anyone who wants to do lots of posting to social media!

Common Questions (FAQs)

Looking for an AI video creator software program? Check out this article:

Synthesia.io Review: A Powerful AI Video Generator