To give you a bit of background -- I'm not trying to compete with Resolve. I'm not targeting experts, but instead targeting beginners and intermediate people when it comes to video editing. And I do offer quite a few features, and my main focus has been on speed from the get go (for instance, Instant Preview everywhere, which as far as I know is only present in Final Cut and nowhere else).
Another focus has been removing as many pain points as possible, making your workflow as fast as possible (obviously, this is always a work in progress).
Thank you for elaborating! First of all: good job not bloating your website the same as wevideo and invideo did - I just can't bring myself to spend time to compare anything with that services, sorry. Also I want to say that I don't want to talk your app down or something - when I was skimming through the features just now I think it looks great.
When it comes to comparisons, and I only have animoto and single-payment-applications which I personally use to compare to, I think the key difference with animoto is that animoto is web-based. I couldn't find out where the processing happens but if it's on their servers, it (in my opinion) justifies paying for computation time.
I understand that your target audience is different when it comes to the advertised features and I understand that your focus is different. This is heavily subjective and maybe I'm too old to get it but I still fail to see why I, as part of your target audience creating videos for social media, should pay a monthly subscription which I'll be locked into for as long as I want to create media when other applications are a one time payment which do the same things (apparently slower) as far as functionality goes. Again: this is heavily subjective and if the subscription model works for you and enables you to further work on the application rather than a single time payment, definitely keep doing it. At the same time I think Windows might need exactly that: something as "straight forward" (if you can call it that) as FCPX with the same snappiness it offers on the M1 chips.
Either way: I wish you the best of luck and success with the app!
About comparison to Animoto - I don't even know where to start. Just think about the fact that it doesn't even have several video layers. It's so simplistic that you can't do anything non-trivial with it. My app is insanely powerful -- it took me months to optimize the timeline to be instant, no matter what you do. And to be able to zoom in/out of the timeline instantly. And to allow for keyframes. And masking. And just look at how many options I give you for editing text. Or if you checked out the second page of features, to see how easily you can work with colors and gradients. Animoto maybe has 5% of my features at best. And the other ones as well.. Now that I think about it, maybe I should do a comparison against each of the web editors, to show how powerful my app is :)
> if the subscription model works for you and enables you to further work on the application rather than a single time payment, definitely keep doing it
Yes, that is the idea behind it. To be able to always improve, and serve my customers better. And tailor it to their needs. And always, make it insanely fast :D
It all started with me trying to bring into the spotlight my then photo viewer app. I created a way to animate between the photos in an album. People started to react positively to that (duh!).
So I improved on the animations. Added more ways to animate... After roughly 2 months I realized this trumped everything else. So I decided to create a video editor. That was more than 3 years ago.
Added more animations, added videos, effects, transitions. Talked to people to understand their pain points... Analyzed other editors for inspiration, spiced it all with a lot of my ideas...
Worked on it non-stop, a lot of crazy hours, a LOT of time spent on optimizations, a lot of time spent on dealing with stupid Microsoft APIs. Luckily, I wasn't alone -- my two dogs have been my emotional support through all the ups and downs (https://www.tiktok.com/@lupiandbelasuperstars/video/69959083...). I love them more than I can express into words -- and of course, a lot of the money I make will be spent on treats and toys, and just making sure those tails never stop moving ;)
Finally, I'm happy with the result, and I'd like to share it with you guys!
Obviously, there's a discount - 40% OFF , it will last until Sun 5th of December.
If you have any questions, I'm more than happy to answer them!
So, the idea is really cool. I do get what it does, and I played with it for a bit.
It is not very intuitive though. What I suggest is, for each cell, allow creating an "arrow" on the left, or on the right. Then, for each arrow, be able to drag it to another node (where you want).
Right now, I simply don't know how to link a node I created (below "party!") to "cleanup".
I agree there should be a mouse-based way to add connections from cell to cell. Right now to make a connection from one node to another you first 'stage' one which highlights it orange (option-s, or use the button in the nav bar). Then you navigate to another node and use the add right/left buttons to make a connection between the staged node and the one you've selected. Clearly that's not intuitive. I'll work on a click and drag mechanism.
Now for a review of CinematicStudio:
I don't have a Windows machine so I'll mostly comment on what I find from your website. Do you have any mac builds? I saw you had a link about Mac but it didn't lead to downloads.
I like the landing page. It's immediately clear that what you're selling is a nice video editing application.
One issue, about 3/4 down the page, is that you repeat a block of text 3 times. The one beginning "Custom Music Visualizers...".
For the little dropdowns in the FAQ I wouldn't close the accordion when the user clicks the body of one of the expanded items. Only close it if they click the header, or an explicit caret. A lot of users click on text even if it isnt necessary, just out of habit (or if they want to copy it).
It seems like you would benefit from making this mobile friendly. Since its a landing page that's selling something, and many potential customers would find it from mobile, you're probably missing potential users.
Little bug -- I noticed the footer has a 'Downloads' section with Windows and Mac links, but they link to the Pricing page, not the Downloads page.
It would be nice to link to a gallery of example videos made with CinematicStudio.
Seems like someone is training some AI, and dumping videos in the process. It may be the way to track progress (like, as he develops his app, videos should get better), maybe to attract investors?
I can tell you from my experience as a freelance, about more than 15 years ago. I actually did something even cooler: 3 day-weeks (12h/day) -- which is higher than 4d work week.
It was beyond awesome!
Unfortunately, it didn't last for more than roughly 2 years, since I made the insanely stupid decision to run the Romanian office of an international outsourcing company (all went downhill from there).
The plan is to eventually return to this, but in the current environment, it's pretty hard to do.
Ouch, that sucks big time. Probably the only thing you can do is to have your boss at least buy (or ask for donations for) SSDs. That would speed up compilations quite a bit.
More RAM could help, but since they're so old, not sure how easy it will be to find it now.
