Blender vs VEED: Which is a better fit?

Kaitlin C.: My name's Kaitlin and I am a graphic designer for a promotional product and workforce development company, and I give Blender a 3 out of 5. And other products that we had been using, and one that was more cost-effective and more easily available to our clientele and our employees as they're low income, so. Join the more accessible 3D aspects, it's in this day and age, with 3D printers and other... It just seemed more fun to be doing things the natural 3D on the screen, as opposed to the two dimensionals that was much more catered towards that. And that was one of my favorites aspects. It was just really hard to adapt from one program to another for me and a few others that were trained solely on the other program. And so, it was just the learning curve was there's not much out there on that can learn how to use it as opposed to some other software, so it was just a complicated transition.

Alex E.: My name's Alex. I'm the founder of Slingshot Content. We're a B2B brand consulting and content marketing agency, and I would rate VEED a two out of five. Prior to using VEED, we were using Kapwing to edit our videos. And Kapwing is a pretty flexible tool, but the way we were using Kapwing was to take longer video clips from a webinar, an interview, a podcast, or even just a recording session, and we wanted to turn it into smaller clips that we would drop into a template to share on social media. Unfortunately, Kapwing doesn't have a great workflow for that. When you trim the videos, you have to drag it, which is tough if you have an hour long video, especially in a browser-based application that's not rendering as quickly. Then you have to export the video, reimport the video, and there's not a good template system in there. So each time you're duplicating a project, deleting a video, reinserting your trimmed video, and then trying to bring your intro slide and your conclusion slide, you're trying to smash it together like a sandwich, and it's just a horribly ineffective workflow. It would take us a whole day, eight-plus hours to edit. One 60-minute clip may be into five or six shorter clips, and that's why we were looking for another solution in VEED. So we decided to start working in VEED for a couple of different reasons. One, it was going to reduce the number of tools we needed to use to record these interview sessions with our clients and then turn them into smaller clips. And it had a better workflow, so we were able to move through more quickly. So the way we were able to reduce tools is because VEED had a feature called VEED Live. It also had... it was called like record a podcast, is how you could use it. So I could send my client a link that they would join, and so they would join there. We would record it directly in VEED, that was our recording tool. And then I could go take that recording all within the VEED platform and start making clips from it, which I'll get into in a minute. So that was really nice because previously I had to use another tool called Riverside FM to record the video clip itself, and then I would take that to Kapwing. So VEED was nice that we were able to reduce the number of tools we had to use. So that was the first reason. And then from there, I had a really nice workflow. I could take that hour long clip, and they had basically what was called create a clip feature. And so what it do is it would transcribe the entire interview, would come out to a transcript and it was pretty accurate, and you could collect or create clips by highlighting the transcript for the clip you wanted to take out. So if it's an hour long video, I could scan for a section where I said, "Clip one, take two," and I could just look to where I saw that. I could even control F search. And then I would highlight my client talking and just hit create a clip and it would create a clip for me that I could then drop easily into another template with a great template feature they had. And so what was an eight-hour plus workflow for us, recording on a tool, exporting from the tool, importing into Kapwing, trimming, exporting, reimporting into templates, fixing the template, and then exporting. We were able to record within VEED, highlight the clips on the transcript that it made right there, drop those into a template, and it reduced our overall workflow from about eight hours to four hours while reducing the number of tools that we had to use. So that was the reason we decided to move to VEED Initially. Getting started with VEED overall was pretty easy. There were a couple of little glitches in the platform you had to get around, but that's to be expected with any tool or always some little nuances or bugs you got to just get used to or build into your workflow. But other than that, the tool's really straightforward. They had some nice templates in there that you could then edit and repurpose, so it matched your branding. I think I was able to get everything set up in VEED within two hours, and that was like a self-guided onboarding, me just poking around. And from there we were able to start using the product like we had hoped to. If you're considering VEED, I would make sure that you get into the platform and really make sure that the features you want are going to be in there. We had switched to VEED for that podcast record and transcription feature, and that feature was removed without more than maybe a week's notice from VEED. And when the feature was discontinued, a core part of their product, after it had been removed, it was still being advertised on their homepage. So you can imagine after we had switched tools from Kapwing to VEED, built a whole new workflow, trained our team on it, it was pretty frustrating when this thing disappeared with just a couple of days heads up. Not only that, but the videos we had in there were going to be deleted, and I only figured this out because I reached out to support when I saw a little banner in the app saying that the product was discontinued. Say likewise, if you need to do a lot of video trimming, if you're going to take an hour long clip and turn it into smaller clips, VEED no longer has that transcription clip tool that was originally part of the VEED podcast tool, and they frankly did a very poor job communicating that to their customers. So if you're going to use VEED, it still has some nice template features, but I will get into the product and make sure it's going to have the features that you need before committing to a purchase.