I was recently asked to review Flexclip for this blog. And no, this is not a sponsored post, as I’m getting no compensation in any form. What I am getting is the pleasure of introducing to you another free tool that can help with your book marketing efforts. Specifically, in this case, in your video creation endeavors.

Truth be told, I didn’t have a particular project in mind. I was going to test-drive it with one of my books, but then it occurred to me that tomorrow is Greek Orthodox Easter, so a nice video card might be just the thing. As it turns out, Flexclip has such rich video, photo and music galleries, that I ended up with more than one projects on my to-do list. I got excited almost immediately with the possibilities.

The Good

Flexclip | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's booksIt is easy enough to start a project and the application gives you a few simple tips to start with. The interface is really friendly and simple to navigate; no complicated menus.

First, you get to choose if you want to use photos or video. Flexclip has a great gallery of ready, public domain material to choose from, so rich and beautiful that you could spend hours perusing it. All the material is categorized and if the categories are not helpful, you can always use the search engine.

After you have selected your medium, you can choose from ready-made formats for text, specifically a title and a subtitle up to 100 characters each. The selection of formats is neither too narrow nor too large and you can incorporate your logo very easily, which is great if you are doing a video for professional use.

There is also a great choice of fonts that cover most occasions without being too extensive (after the huge gallery of photos, videos, and music, not having a too varied choice of text formats was appreciated). I loved that Flexclip included enough unusual fonts to choose from. On the downside, if you want different fonts on the title and subtitle, thatโ€™s not possible.

You can choose the point of the video where you want your text to appear. Easy, handy, nothing to see here.

Once the video is complete, you can add sound and music. Unless you have something specific in mind, you might again spend a few hours listening to the available scores. But, hey, thatโ€™s better than having 5 silly tunes to choose from. There are tunes for every mood and occasion, and a nice search engine if you already know what kind of music you want for your project.

Once you complete a full cycle of the above process, you find yourself with a finished storyboard. You can go on and create more than one storyboards, and order them around to make a more complicated clip with different videos, images, and text.

Here is the end result:

The Bad

Personally, I have nothing bad to report. Everything, from picking the media to exporting the final video, ran as smoothly as possible.

However, a friend who also tried it out pointed out that the current version of Flexclip only works with Google Chrome, so this is something to consider. When she tried it on her iPad, she was unable to use it, despite installing Google Chrome on it. She wanted to use Flexclip from her iPad, as that’s where her photos and videos were stored, but ended up transferring her photos and videos from her tablet to her PC. Even then, she still had some trouble with her stored media–videos taken with her digital camera failed to upload (I suspect a format issue might be responsible for that).

Hopefully, future versions will offer better support for other platforms.

So, if you’re looking for an easy-peasy, free way to create an awesome video in seconds, be sure to give Flexclip a try!