Powtoon Review

Detailed Reviews

With so much media content being shared online, adding top-quality content has become a priority for most people. Now for young peeps, it’s all about glamour and show-offs. For people in sales and marketing stuff, they need to charm their customers for emptying their stocks.

With this, media content can be used in numerous forms, from personal glory to business needs and even political propaganda. For each of them, a simple recorded video doesn’t work. Even if the recordings are reasonable, we need to enhance them, especially if they are boring business slideshows, sales reports, or making any video/presentation enjoyable.

Have you ever seen an incredible video editing, even by ordinary folks? Well, such moments are indeed possible now. This is owing to the fact that we have products named Cloud Video Creators. These are used to convert an ordinary video exciting or fun-filled, and can be accessed from any corner of world with internet.

Pros

• One of the most sophisticated interfaces among cloud video creators.
• Top class video editing They have paid attention to many minor details.
• Ample themes and templates for making videos.
• It comes with a handy and bountiful stock of royalty-free images and videos.
• They have divided the editor interface into multiple tabs for every feature.
• Users can switch between basic/pro mode while editing videos.
• Tons of unique characters, props, and shapes to be added into your slides.
• Decent music library for presentations.
• Good post-publishing features. It can directly upload to multiple social profiles, or even use it in the form of links.

Cons

• Text editor needs more pro settings. Customs fonts are only in enterprise plans, which is a big screw up.
• The image editor was bugged while we were testing it.
• No dedicated trim option for video and audio
• Very limited time period trial version of 4 days instead of a week. The Powtoon watermark has an annoying placement.
• Cannot add multiple voiceovers/audio in a single slide.
• The limit per slide is 20 seconds, which is really low. Per presentation, the time limit is 90 seconds.
• UI can be very slow at certain times. Also, some users may find things a bit cluttered.
• Somewhat costly. Export feature blocks mp4 downloads and SlideShare exchange.
• Limited collaborations. It has no options to export things to popular cloud storage.

Introduction

Video Creator Tools allow you to edit an existing video as well as create new ones from scratch. One of the main aims of such video creators is to transform regular videos/presentations into something enjoyable. This is done with the help of stock images, videos, slides, or by adding animations, texts, and music into them.

Amongst such video creator tools, we have Powtoon Video Creator. Seeming like a power tool, this software has topped the market in cloud video creation. Founded since January 2012, Powtoon has grabbed over 10 million users across the globe.

With different versions such as standard subscription, educational plan, and enterprise edition, they claim to have generated over 20 million videos on their site. Apart from its cloud interface, it has also branched across other services like HubSpot, Google Drive, YouTube, Facebook, Panopto, and SlideShare.

Well, this certainly adds to our excitement before analyzing it. Along the lines of video creation, we will be attempting to create things from scratch.

For novice folks, who have zero content to begin with, it is necessary to have preset content, that requires minimal editing. While most pro-users love starting with a blank template, both of these situations are to be assessed by us.

Quick Tour of Powtoon

Now, before raiding Powtoon’s Video Creator, we can quickly run through its features. Why? Because for advanced-users, it takes lesser time to figure out things. For novice readers, we need to give an overview before jumping into technical stuff.

Opening with the setup itself, it is a cloud-based utility. Unlike desktop products, users need not save their files separately and then worry about securing them.

Like every cloud software, an account on their cloud interface is a must. Powtoon offers a 4-day free trial mode. The best part is that users need not to input credit card info for that. Contrary to other tools like Promo.com, Animoto, etc., they have used Email verification.

After you retrieve the trial version, it will guide you to the template section. In this part, users need to select an appropriate slide. There are tons of layouts in the templates section, which we will inspect in the next section.

For now, select any slide. This sends you to the video creator zone. Here, there are tons of editing features waiting for you to use on. Try any editing you want. In fact, we advise you to go hammer and tongs and explore each button in the setup.

As far as we know, getting good practice and knowledge of individual functions is simple. After that, preview it, and then use download button. If you still have some uncertainty, utilize the tutorials given by them in the help section.

Following this, try to recreate videos from scratch. In our view, if you are seriously goofing around, it mustn’t take more than a full day to get a good hold of Powtoon’s functions.

As promised, we now run-over to see how good the stock of templates is? Will it suffice our unique needs?

Choosing a Perfect Template as Per Your Taste

One of the foremost crucial parts of creating a fantastic presentation/video is to pick a perfect template. This is even more important for novice players since pro-users can playfully make things from scratch.

Novice users need to pick a preset theme/template, which helps them to produce a decent video. With time and practice, we feel themes usually become redundant.

Nevertheless, themes in Powtoon are given in the templates section. This can be retrieved from the top navigation bar. Powtoon has split the templates into three main categories.

These are Work, Educational, and Personal. All 3 of them are frequently used in online video creators. Now, under the Work Tab, you can view common choices like product ads, presentations, marketing stuff, company guidelines, IT, reports, etc.

In the Education Tab, only two of them are given, viz. student and teacher. Pretty sad! Nothing for other office staff, ehhh! Lastly, in Personal Zone, we have templates for holidays, special events, inspirational, announcements, and tips.

Now, compared to other tools like Animoto, Doodly, Promo.com, Renderforest, etc., picking a template is limited among all. There are no filters like in other tools. The themes may seem inadequate at first, but the customization is much more comparatively.

However, there is a search button to hunt any popular theme inside Powtoon. After that, there are three main buttons over these themes viz., theme info, preview, and use now.

Picking a template is the most natural step for making videos. Beyond that, it is your ingenuity that will help in making beautiful videos. Make sure to utilize all the editing features, or at least try each of them. After this, we have to review the core interface of video editor.

Let’s Unleash Video Editor’s Features

Most video editors keep bragging about their preset templates. However, as we move deeper into their setup, they lack many essential editing features. To be honest, what is the use of such a video creator that lacks proper tools for creating/editing videos.

For this reason, Powtoon is on a strict inspection streak. To access these editing features, you will need to move out of the template section. As we didn’t mention earlier, users are also free to pick blank templates.

These blank templates are aimed for pro-users. Even novice users may try it and learn crafting videos from scratch. In the video editor setup of Powtoon, things might be a bit complicated to grasp on the first visit.

Novice users will need at least a day or two with dedicated practice to learn its usage. Starting off, this setup is basically shed into two parts, i.e., Edit Mode & Create Mode.

As said before, Powtoon gave Edit Mode for novice users, and Create Mode for advanced users. Typically, edit mode is used just to replace fonts, images, rearrange them, etc. from the many preset templates.

In the case of create mode, users are given much better editing options. So now, we can test things from both novices, as well as advanced users’ perspective. Similar video editors like Promo.com, Renderforest, Animoto, etc., do not have such provisions.

Normal Edit Mode

For primary practice, this mode will suffice most video freaks. Now, what are the base features in this editor? How to use it for fundamental editing? Are they good enough?

For all such questions, first, try Powtoon. This format has minimal settings in it. The top navigation bar offers options viz., undo/redo, edit name, premium status, save status, and preview & export.

The interface is divided into 3 zones, i.e., left-side pane, central editing pane, & right-side advanced pane. Out of these, the advanced setup is turned OFF in the basic/edit mode.

In the left side panel, they have kept the slides like in PowerPoint. These slides are draggable. Between each slide, you have an option to add slide transitions. The top of the slide has a drop-down menu.

The bottom of this setup has an Add Slide button. Using that, we can choose from a preset slide, or create our own. On each individual slide, there is an ellipsis symbol showing options to add, swap, duplicate, or delete slides.

This menu must be hidden for better fullscreen editing. Moving to the central panel, it has comparable features to most video creators.

Around these slides, we have buttons for grid view, add a new element, aspect ratio, zoom in/out, play button, and audio button. As said before, these are essential functions standard in every other video creator.

However, there is a settings wheel on each slide. It has swap, flip, blur, edit image, start time, sound, color, and opacity settings. So much in the basic setup itself, isn’t it?

Now, most of these functions are really easy to decipher. For now, we just inspect more significant functions. Onto the crop button, users can pick only three formats, i.e., Landscape for YouTube, Square Shape, & Vertical for Facebook.

This is enough for regular use, but adding custom sizes/resolution would be better. Regarding the zoom button, they could’ve added a magnifying glass pointer to allow zooming directly on a specific area, rather than affecting full slide.

In the bottom, there are two play buttons. The smaller one is used to play current slide only. The other one continues to play all slides along with the current one.

Now, Powtoon hasn’t given a traditional player-bar. Instead of that, there’s a timer with start time and end time. This may make things confusing for some users, and so we feel that adding player-bar is a must.

The developers reading this might point to the create mode, isn’t it? Although things are provided in advanced setup, we believe a player bar is among the traditional method to interact with a particular time-stamp in the video, and therefore must be in all setups, novice or advanced.

Another thing to be optimized here is the undo/redo button on top. They need to add a drop-down menu here. Umm, What for? Well, this must list out the changes made to the original template, like multiple save versions.

They can restrict it to save up to 10 changes. Rest all things seemed sharp, even for basic editing. Now, Let’s storm the advanced editor.

Evaluate Advanced Editing with Create-Mode

Wonder why we chose to separate out this from above section? Well, this part really deserves separate headlines. It is really exhaustive than lots of video creators we have used before.

The entire look and UI seems to have upgraded once we get into the advanced setup. As depicted before, the right side emerges out after you switch to Create Mode. In the bottom section too, the simple timers for the video turn into a standard player-bar.

After noticing this, you can witness a drop-down button over the right panel. From here, they allow us to choose a look for Powtoon. Of these, the five basic ones are Modern Edge, Whiteboard, Cartoon, Infographics, and Real Look.

Each of them has got different templates in the later sections. Now, over the advanced panel, we have useful options like scenes, background, characters, props, shapes, images, videos, sounds, and special effects.

Every one of these have distinct special effects and elements to play with. Based on the main five categories above, these graphics and objects will change. Users can directly use the search button to look for an item.

However, it will only show results based on the type of Powtoon interface chosen before. There is a subtle UI adjustment given by them in the search option. There are red numbers displayed over each section of the advanced panel.

These numbers are based on search results, and indicate net associated items in each section. Another thing we noticed was that the right-click interface was discrete here, which in any case, was good to see.

The right-click will allow adjustments for adding ready-made scenes, blank slides, swap background/scenes, remove slides, background settings, and preview/export Powtoon.

The bottom player-bar had similar features. Users can directly drag the pointer to a frame location. There is a limitation on the total time in each slide. This limit is 20 seconds per slide. This cannot be altered even for video files longer than that.

Powtoon splits such long videos into equal parts, around 10-15 seconds each when you add them. But, users can independently modify these parts, as continuous slides.

Powtoon can avoid this by letting us add full video in a single slide. They can generate a prompt asking to split the videos with Yes/No options. Honestly, for regular use, videos longer than 5 minutes aren’t used in most presentations, but 20 seconds is too low.

And it's better to use tools like MS PowerPoint, where it is more natural to attach videos in a slideshow. Nevertheless, talking of the player-bar, there are some tiny icons below it, seen at specific time-stamps.

These are the markers for your added effects on that slide. Users can simply drag them at a desired location in the player-bar. Lastly, there is a +/- button at the end of this bar. This is used to add/remove 1 second from the selected slide. Contrarily, users can right-click on a location over the player-bar, and directly add/remove desired seconds.

This is again a very exceptional feature not seen in other products like Animoto, Renderforest, Moovly, Promo.com, etc. In fact, such customization itself is very rare in any player-bar.

Moving on, we will see what each of the given function in the right-side panel is used for. So far, other than a few minor mishaps, Powtoon has done a fantastic job in advanced editing.

Adding Scenes and Backgrounds

After discussing about pro-setup for so long, now we get a chance to inspect it and see how we can use it to create a video. In Powtoon, these scenes are preset templates that can be modified directly without many efforts.

Inside them, we can either edit preset things and create videos, or just replace the preset content with our own images, videos, objects, etc.

Just like the concept of scenes in other media fields, scenes here too indicate situations, stances, concepts, etc. When it comes to that, Powtoon has divided them into specific types viz., My Scenes, Intros, Specifics, Image Grids, Situations, Concepts, Call To Action, and Outros.

Each of these categories have different types of scene collections. The top section will list the scenes you’ve created in the past.

There are several items in each scene that can be edited. These scenes have everything fixed. Just look at the timeline below to see every animation effect.

Novice users ought to use these scenes directly. For others, we can adapt to change them as per our needs.

We will review the editing of individual elements later. For now, we believe there are more than enough supply of scenes and other media to get things started. Based on every Powtoon category, there are animated items present in these.

Especially in Cartoon Powtoon, users can see loads of animated scenes. This includes flying witches, Halloween toons, earth diggers, cycling people, and many such animation effects. Such diversity in each scene, with collections of 100s of such scenes, is genuinely remarkable.

Such reserves give Powtoon a significant edge over other similar products. Most of the product except some like Wave.Video, Doodly, etc., do not offer such preset animations. Use them to make beautiful videos or slideshows.

Now, onto the slide backgrounds. This is an essential thing even our novice users must know of. Be it while making a presentation in academics, seminars, or office presentations, we all have done this step.

Similarly, Powtoon allows adding background on each slide. These backgrounds can be in form of images or videos. For now, we stick to the usual image backgrounds.

This is different from the traditional pics that you add in the slides. A background mostly remains stagnant throughout the presentation. For that reason, choose a background that won’t clog/distract individual items on the presentation.

There are only a few settings available for editing these backgrounds. One of them is transparency settings. Other ones are the swap, flip, blur, edit, start time, sound, and colors; all of which are very self-explanatory.

Moving on, the background section too has tons of alternatives, like premium images, premium videos, video footage, free images, marketing videos, urban & nature videos, locations, colors, abstracts, images, or textures.

If you still struggle to find from these, use the search button to specify your need. You can also click the show all button.

The only thing we found here hindering, was a slower UI. As unusual it may sound, this was indeed an issue. Now, this may depend on system and network settings, or many other factors.

However, even with a regular office system and a high-speed internet connection, things were bit laggy The preview loaded really slow. This can be due to lots of cluttered themes into single section, which then generates lags loading these components.

One thing Powtoon can do here is to separate some of these functions, like into a different window, which can reduce the lag and loading time. Other than this mild lag, we didn’t found any trouble here. All these themes were incredible.

Compared to other similar products, many video creators do not follow this presentation style video creation.

And many video creators merely allow us to add images & just add text over them. Contrarily to that, you can create a full-fledged presentation here. We can also edit individual objects, consequently.

Using Text Editor

Added images, configured animations, now what? Well, we aren't going to make empty videos/presentations. For that, we need to add some text too in it.

The text editor is a super chased feature in video creator tools. This is because most video creators are only basic, which means their only function is to add fancy text over a bunch of images and videos.

In Powtoon, we can find the text editor on the right side advanced menu. This is not accessible in the normal edit mode, which is not practical.

You can merely add/remove/modify text in a primary mode by simply selecting the text boxes. A text editor is pretty crucial part of the video creator tool and must be present even in the basic mode.

Here, there is a separate section for the main text editor. Apart from stock of unique texts, we will also review the number of modifications possible in each text type.

Basically, Powtoon has listed various text elements. The top picks include Title, Subtitle, Body Text, and also categories like Video Titles, Text Elements, Titles, Infographics, And Badges.

Now, pick one, let’s say title text. Drag it in the center pane. Add a title to it. While editing, you can see various options for text alteration.

These are font type, size, color, opacity, animation effects, animation path, arrangement, justify, and lastly link option. There are general formatting buttons for bold, italics, and underline.

Standard options, isn’t it? Inspecting from the first one, they have given around 50+ distinct font types. These include fonts in other languages like Arabic, Persian, Greece, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

For beginners, these fonts are more than enough. However, pro-users can also upload their fonts using the upload button below this drop-down menu.

Besides each of these fonts, there’s a star icon to put a particular font type in the favorite tab. There is also a search button to filter fonts quickly. Sadly, there are no standard font types like Times New Roman, Calibri, Verdana, etc. To be honest, most video creators have limited variety in fonts.

But, there was one disappointment here. The thing is, uploading fonts require Agency Subscription of their service. This isn’t given for even pro-plan subscribers, which is disheartening.

Many free video creators also support custom fonts. With a much-limited stock of fonts, they must add this feature for all paid users, and not limiting it to the highest-paid plan.

Next is the font size option. Unlike a size input field, they’ve used a +/- sign to increase/decrease the font size. Clicking or holding these buttons can be annoyance. But, they also have a drop-down menu with font size from 90, to the smallest at 14.

Then the usual formatting choices like bold, italics, underline, justify, and colors also help to personalize texts.

The exciting options now come on the platter. Starting with the Font Effects, it gives animation effects to any text box. Here, two primary effect type for texts are present. One is entry effect, and another one is an exit effect.

Both had similar effects like writing hand, vanishing words, roll, bounce, slide, fade, pop in/out, etc. You can also choose the color of the hand used in the writing effects, along with adding spooky sound effects.

Overall, this is pretty unique. Such features are rarely found in other video converters. We can certainly enjoy more such effects. It allows users to add effect to the text shape, size, and location. This is useful in making spooky zoom in/out effects.

Then, we have the text position modifier. Users cannot directly change the size of the subsequent text from here. They can only drag their location and orientation.

The arrange button is used to manage the text property over the canvas, i.e., send it backward, bring it forward, etc. This allows controlling superimposing texts and their appearance over different layers.

Similar to these, Powtoon has given us a few fancy texts too. There are 100s of such fancy writings given in here. For editing them, the same selections as above are present. It is mind-boggling to see so much in the text editor itself.

Now, evaluating it with products like Animoto, Doodly, Promo.com, etc., this product has undoubtedly taken the upper hand. Such detailed and exclusive texts for each type of need is not present in any of these. The only negative point was the custom fonts being exclusive to the enterprise plans, which they need to change and include in all paid plans.

Making Dynamic Slides by Adding Unique Characters, Props, and Shapes

What can be more amazing than inserting various characters, shapes, emojis, etc. in our videos. Instead of having usual boring office slides, your office presentations can have better engaging graphics.

One such method to revitalize them is to uses Powtoon’s shape addition option. For keeping it uncomplicated, they have formed distinct section viz., Characters, Props, and Shapes.

All of these are part of additional graphics that can be added to the videos and slides. Starting with Character Graphics, we have to inspect them one by one. Since these features are distinct in every video creator, comparison only in terms of variety/stock can be made.

In this staple, there are several character graphics. Once again, this will vary as you switch the Powtoon view from top. Each of these views has about 12+ types of characters/toons.

This includes general life human characters like office workers, masons, bosses, fashion freaks, sports players, shadows, stickmen, etc. Not only this, users can pick various emotions for each of them like sad, happy, cry, angry, etc.

Here, an animated character can be looped for repeating its effect. Wow! So much personalization. Trying through many of these toons, we are sure that most of the users can find a relevant animated toon for their setup.

How about adding props to these characters? We mean, what good is a mason without bricks, or a footballer without football? For that, we can switch to the Props Menu of Powtoon setup.

As the name suggests, props are general items or certain commodities used by us in daily life. The main categories for these props in Powtoon are hands & gestures, tech/web, office, crypto, business, transport, education, food, nature, and medical.

Every type above has several amazing items to be chosen from. This category is same across all the Powtoon look, except the animations and graphics change inside each of them.

To be honest, if you compare it to an offline video creator tool, the stock for these props will seem limited. However, amongst online video creators, they have already shaken the floor.

You can directly search for your prop from the top search bar too. They all have same previous editing functions. Only changing color of these items isn’t possible.

The Shapes in Powtoon are basic as well as complex. This means, although the graphics/style of shapes is ordinary, their animations, effects, etc. and other editing features are great. A few of the shapes are preset, but most of them can be edited.

These shapes are mainly grouped as basic shapes, animated shapes, image frames, slide overlays, chart elements, and design elements.

Most of them are having some unique animations; from swirling effect of witch’s broom, or flapping of a bird, many amazing things we can add into a presentation or video.

The last section of the advanced toolbar, i.e., Special Themes, is another place to get such amazing animated objects. This section is unique since it includes some of the popular objects and animations as in Social, Events, Family Holidays, Winter Holidays, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Spring Vacations, African Tribes, Memorial Day, and so on.

All of these are wonderful for your videos. Be sure to check them out before you do anything. It is really amazing of Powtoon to include so many diverse items to be utilized in our videos.

Now, concluding to these three graphical add-ons, the only word that comes to mind is amazing! It is admirable of them to incorporate so many objects, along with different effects for each of them.

Most of these objects had the vibe of a presentation tool, but if used properly, we can make an excellent animated video with it.

Managing Images, Videos and Music In the Slides

There are so many shapes, texts, or objects being given by Powtoon. But, how do you add our media files into the slides? Can we modify these media files here?

For all such queries, we must try to learn more by using the Images & Videos feature in Powtoon. Like any other video creator, the function of this media manager is universal. Upload the user content, edit it if possible, and then produce videos using it.

Let’s try with images first. Most video creators, apart from uploading user images, have their own stock of images. This is to avoid users searching different images across the internet, and that too by avoiding all the copyrighted ones.

Indeed, for professional or monetary usage online, finding the right picture can be nasty, especially if they need royalty. But worry not! We are allowed to use royalty-free stock images from here, and that too as many as we like.

But before that, we must check what kind of images we can upload. Owing to which, Powtoon allows three ways to add images. These are general uploading, i.e. via computer devices or cloud storage; then using the camera feature, which is currently in beta-mode; and lastly, hire a designer.

Wait. What? Hire a designer? How does that work? Well, one great thing pulled by this video creator is adding integration with Fiverr. Most of you may be familiar with this freelance website. This integration is not with the entire website, but only with single page.

This page is exclusive to Powtoon's account and consists of graphics designers working as freelancers. If you are interested in any of the art, you can directly contact the designer to pick from one of his arts or make him create new ones.

There are around 15 designers in here, with different experience and skills. We are quite sure that if you are interested in something cringy, you can undoubtedly rely on this additional setup by Powtoon.

But, keep in mind that the formats supported here are only JPG, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Convert any illustrations or graphics to these before uploading. Nevertheless, it also permits direct cloud transfer via popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive and Photos, Dropbox, etc.

After you’ve uploaded a photo, you can directly drag it to the center slide. The options to edit the images are same as we saw in the text editor and objects.

They have also used an integration with Adobe Photoshop via Photoshop Plugin. Using that, we can edit the images in Photoshop before adding them into slides. Users can also login into Powtoon setup in the photoshop interface itself.

They can exchange their artwork from here too. When it comes to image stocks, they have images from Flickr, both free as well as a premium stock. There won’t be any shortage for images, trust us!

One thing lacking here is the appropriate image filters. Yes, a small thing that seemed to be inaccessible here. The edit images button when you right-click an image doesn’t work. They said they have temporarily halted it due to some bug.

The crop feature was totally based on shape selection. Other than this, no advanced image editing features were there. Overall, the image editing was not that great in the default setup.

Users need to choose different software for that, which would put an unnecessary load. Also, in our view, these things in this setup are more than enough, for now at least!

Video Uploading

The next setup for media files is checking video features. The video setup is not that distinct from the images. It has a nearly comparable set of options.

The videos section has mainly four selections viz., upload premium videos, video footage, marketing videos, urban & nature footages. Quite a familiar streak, isn’t it?

However, only mp4 format is supported in here. Apart from that, users can only upload videos 90 seconds long, with a size limit of 500 MB. Any video having a higher runtime than this will be trimmed to 90 seconds.

Now, this might seem a bit weird to some users. Unlike a typical PowerPoint presentation, we cannot attach/link an external media to our slides; where we usually upload all videos to a storage drive and then link the video path in a presentation slide.

But in cloud storage, it is necessary to keep in check the video length and its size. The servers have limited storage currently, and so trimming these uploads is a natural preference of Powtoon.

Also, in our personal experience, most online videos, like social media cover videos, ads, etc. with 90 seconds runtime are ok. One more thing you’ll notice is that they split the video into multiple parts, even if the file is under 90 seconds.

Once again, this is due to the time limit of 20 seconds in each slide. On one hand, Powtoon has given so much diversity in previous divisions, whereas they have kept things quite restrained here. We are pretty sure there is some valid reason for this.

Nevertheless, editing a video from here is not possible. Even basic video filters are absent. You cannot add some of the popular video effects like pulsations, water effects, wave motion, etc.

We understand that incorporating them here can complicate things, but we also feel that some of these familiar effects can easily be added as extra video filters.

Overall, stock videos are also amazing. Most of them are optimized for 20-second runtime. So, no need to do trimming. Now, talk of trimming, there is no straight option for that in Powtoon!

You may be surprised by this, but trimming is only possible via timeline settings. This means that if a user wants to input the start time and end-time of a video, they will have to do this by setting them manually.

When you right-click on a video slide, there’s an option to set the start-time. Add it accordingly, and then use the bottom timeline to restrict the end-time. After all the fun stuff in the above sections, this really frustrated us.

It is really needed for Powtoon to consider adding a separate/dedicated trim button here. The current version is confusing, even for advanced users. This must be in to-do list for Powtoon.

Music Selection

Now for the music part. Have we ever made an excellent presentation/video without a piece of awesome music in it? Also, how about adding voiceovers? We can make an entire video presentation explain itself with such a feature.

For adding these, we use the Sound Tab. From here, you can add items like Manual Music, Voiceovers, Premium Sounds, Or Free Music. The formats for both music & voiceover uploads are MP3, AAC, AND OGG.

Luckily, there’s no direct limit on music length you can add here. But, Powtoon will eventually trim it as per the total video length. Once again, no facility to input music at a desired time-stamp in the slides.

It will play on an entire slide. So, no spooky bat music on Dracula’s entry, or laugh of hideous witches in the same slide. You will have to externally arrange these audio timings and then upload them all together for each slide.

Users can add audio either for an individual slide, or an entire presentation. This is still a handy feature. You still need to chop the audio clip before uploading it here, since you cannot trim audio.

There’s an option to play the entire music in a slide along with an individual voiceover. If you want to add separate voiceovers in a description, just duplicate the previous slide and add the subsequent voiceover from the previous timestamp.

These are shortcut tricks for improving audio editing. But frankly, Powtoon needs to add voice trimmers, as well as permit using multiple voiceovers in same slide.

Next, we look at the music stock given by them. We use the premium sounds and free sounds and input audio files in the presentation. All these files can be filtered based on their genre.

Most of them are under 2.5 minutes, a bit higher than 90-second video-limit. Once you’ve added the music, it is time to have a rock and roll presentation/video.

Let Us Publish Our Work Online

It is finally time for us to get some results for hours of editing we have done in the slides. This is where we are going to publish our work, and then see its outcome.

When it comes to finalizing the videos in these video creators, most of them allow us to share the links across various social media sites directly.

In Powtoon, to finalize the videos, use the button Preview & Export. With that, they have allowed the file to be exported in either presentation format, or a complete video form.

This export feature is elementary. There are few links, from where you can directly import the videos, or manually download them.

When it comes to link sharing, Powtoon offers to upload videos directly to accounts like YouTube, Facebook, SlideShare, Vimeo, Wistia, HubSpot, Facebook Ads, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

All of these are leading social media platforms for sharing videos. They’ve left Instagram, however. Also, it would be nice if they included cloud storage products like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.

To downloads in separate file types, three formats are given viz., MP4, PDF, and PPT. If not these, you can also Email yourself the watch link, or create an embedded URL of the video.

All of these are straightforward processes. If you have previously uploaded content on any of the internet platforms, it will be a similar experience here.

One more thing to note here is that trial users won’t get to download the MP4 version of a video, along with no publishing rights on SlideShare, and no 1080p video download.

Regardless of this, it is a top-notch publishing feature. The only con here is that there is no linked analytics section.

Many video converters allow us to share video over their domain either by direct links or by embed URLs. After this, they also provide us with an internal analytics option; to see how many people viewed the video, net page visits, downloads, shares, etc. Similar, or say much better analytics can also be incorporated by Powtoon.

At this point, our expedition of testing Powtoon ends. Overall, a feeling of complete gratification has been experienced by us.

Our Conclusion

As you see from the above evaluation, we have skinned the entire setup of Powtoon for you folks. Under this, we have found fantastic editing features, graphics, and much more remarkable stuff.

There were only a couple of strange encounters for us here. In our tests, the image editor wasn’t working. When we forwarded this to the support team, they told us that it been closed temporarily due to some bugged interactions.

Another issue in the editing section was custom fonts restricted to enterprise plans, which was overkill.

Another thing was no dedicated/direct trimming button in either audio or video editing. At least in the video section, we can manually split the start-time, and end-time. But in the audio section, you’ll have to trim them externally in advance.

These were all some minor mishaps we found in Powtoon. Rest assured, most of the features are absolutely worth it. And because of that, we would certainly weigh Powtoon higher than products like Promo.com, Animoto, Renderforest, Doodly, etc. The returns are fantastic in the current pricing plan.

However, they still need to have better themes, when equated to products like Adobe Spark, Wave.Video, Render Forest, Flyr, etc. All of these have highly complex, and more creative templates.

Nevertheless, Powtoon is undoubtedly a no brainer while selecting a cloud video creator. So, why wait? Head to their site and try it. Let us know if you find anything noteworthy in it.