Is Pictory worth an investment? If you’re looking to scale content production of short, bite-sized videos for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram, I’d argue, yes – here’s why…
YouTube Shorts are massively popular and a huge potential revenue source, and with Pictory, an AI-powered video-editing tool, you can 10X your content production by leveraging its built in features to quickly create and publish shorts to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
For many content creators, the actual process of generating new and engaging content is, of course, the hardest part of their job. You have to be creative, engaging, and spend untold hours editing down long videos, as well as shooting and scripting them. And this all takes a lot of time.
If you’re already established, however, and you have an arsenal of existing video content under your belt, a tool like Pictory can help you use it to create new content for different formats – formats like YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram.
But here’s the REALLY cool part: you don’t even need existing video content to get started; you can use written blogs and, through magic of AI, Pictory will convert them into videos.
Pretty cool, right? It gets better. Lots better. Because Pictory is an AI-powered tool, you basically don’t have to do anything, save for uploading your video content (or blog posts) and selecting a few options. If you’re keen to get in on the YouTube Shorts money train, a tool like Pictory could be just what the doctor ordered.
Pictory Review: Key Takeaways
- AI-Powered Content Transformation: Pictory uses AI to convert your long-form content into engaging, digestible videos for sharing across various social media platforms. It extracts the key highlights from your content, allowing you to create tailored videos with your brand’s logos, colors, and fonts.
- Effortless Editing and Customization: Pictory transcribes speech in your videos, enabling you to select the text to keep or cut. You can remove filler words automatically, add branded bumpers, intros, outros, captions, and more, making your videos production-ready in minutes.
- Increased Accessibility and SEO Ranking: Pictory lets you automatically add captions or subtitles to your videos, increasing accessibility for muted playback and improving SEO ranking. You can burn captions into the video or download them in various formats.
- Multilingual Support: Pictory supports videos in over 20 different languages, allowing you to connect with a global audience.
- Long-Form Text to Video Conversion: Pictory’s AI detects the most necessary sentences from your long-form text and turns it into a video. You can fine-tune the script, add visuals from a massive library of licensed stock images and video clips, or upload your own. Adding music and voiceovers to match your theme is also possible.
- Extensive Features in All Plans: Pictory’s plans offer an array of features, including a 20-minute max video length for text to video, automatic subtitles, auto highlights, the ability to set your fonts and colors, add logos, and more. Higher-tier plans offer even more features and resources.
- Prices start from just $19 a month
Table of Contents
Pictory Features: Why We Love Pictory
Script to Video
This feature allows users to input a script, and Pictory will automatically generate a video based on the script. It breaks down every sentence into a new scene and automatically pulls content from Storyblocks and Shutterstock to use for visuals.
Article to Video
Pictory allows users to convert a URL for a blog, press release, or any other website into a video. It extracts content from the URL and gives users control over which sentences or content from the article show up in the video.
This is a huge game-changer, especially if you’re currently only blogging. Video content is the most popular way to consume content online – this is why big brands invest millions in video production. Smaller publishers and bloggers, however, can use the power of AI to quickly expand their reach on YouTube and Instagram with this tool.
And the cost of getting started with Pictory is next to nothing; you’re looking at just $19 a month for the basic package or slightly more for its Tier 2 package. You can check out all of Pictory’s tiers and costs farther down the page.
Edit Videos with Voice Using Text
This feature allows users to edit their videos by manipulating the transcription. Users can remove words or phrases, and Pictory will cut that part of the video out. It also has a “remove filler words” feature that automatically removes filler words from the transcription and the video.
And if you don’t want to use your own voice in your videos, you can pick one of Pictory’s impressive AI voiceovers to do all the talking, so you can have a headless, voiceless YouTube channel allowing you to remain completely anonymous if you wish.
Visuals to Video
This feature allows users to create videos from their own content. If users have their own images or video clips, they can upload them to Pictory, and it will create the video from them.
Customizable Styles and Brand Settings
Pictory allows users to customize the appearance of their videos. They can change the format, text styles, colors, fonts, and more. They can also add background music and voiceovers to their videos.
Pictory is Incredibly Easy to Use
Pictory is designed to be user-friendly and easy to use. It offers a straightforward process for creating videos, whether from a script, an article, or visuals. It also provides a fast editing process, with the ability to change out visuals for each scene, add background music, and apply voiceovers.
We have already published a full Pictory tutorial, so I won’t bore you with the details of how it works in this review. But the key takeaway here is simple: Pictory is ridiculously easy to use – if you can point and click with your mouse, and read, you can use Pictory.
Whether you’re augmenting existing video content or repurposing a blog post for conversion into a video, all you have to do is select the appropriate option inside Pictory and follow the steps. Once you’ve done this, you can start tweaking and customizing the video to your liking, adding in effects, bumpers, and branding – whatever you like.
Here’s just a brief overview of some of the effects and design features you have at your disposal with Pictory:
- Edit Videos with Voice Using Text: This feature allows you to edit your videos by manipulating the transcription. You can remove words or phrases, and Pictory will cut that part of the video out.
- Remove Filler Words: Automatically remove filler words from the transcription and the video, making your content more concise and professional.
- Customizable Styles: Change the appearance of your videos, including the format, text styles, colors, fonts, and more.
- Background Music: Add background music to your videos from Pictory’s library to enhance the mood and engagement of your content.
- Voiceovers: Apply voiceovers to your videos. You can control the speed and choose from different voices.
- Textures: Add different background textures and styles to your videos if you don’t want to use videos or images.
- Scene Editing: Add, delete, or rearrange scenes in your video. Each sentence in your script or article forms a new scene.
- Visual Search: Search for images or videos from Pictory’s library based on keywords or categories to use in your scenes.
- Brand Settings: Customize the colors, fonts, and other elements of your videos to match your brand.
- Video Trimming: Trim your videos to the desired length directly within Pictory.
- Video Preview: Preview your video before finalizing it to ensure it meets your expectations.
- Video Generation: Once you’re satisfied with your video, Pictory generates it in high quality, ready for you to download and use.
- Video Size Selection: Choose the size of your video, such as landscape, portrait, or square, to suit different platforms and purposes.
Pictory As A Revenue Generation Tool
The potential for making money with Pictory lies in its ability to create high-quality, professional videos with ease. Users can use these videos for various purposes, such as marketing their products or services, creating engaging content for their audience, or even offering video creation services to clients.
YouTube Shorts is now being heavily pushed by Google in a bid to help its streaming platform stay competitive with TikTok. This means, if you’re online business relies on adverting revenue, targeting YouTube Shorts – which is insanely easy with a tool like Pictory – is a very quick way of injecting potential, new revenue streams into your business.
Plenty of unknown, small YouTube creators are making anywhere from $500 to $5000 a month using tools like Pictory to 10X their content creation by tapping into things like YouTube Shorts
Think about it: when you open YouTube, Shorts are front and center and most of the time it is populated by channels you do not follow or have any prior engagement with. The reason for this is simple: Google wants you to consume more content, follow more creators, and stay on its platform for longer.
With respect to SEO for Shorts, that’s a whole other kettle of fish but the fact that Pictory supports AI-generated subtitles means most of your in-video SEO is taken care of automatically which means, whether your current YouTube channel is large or small, there’s massive potential to be shown inside YouTube’s Shorts carousal.
Pictory Price: How Much Does It Cost?
Pictory offers several plans for its AI tool, each with its unique set of features that are designed for different types of user. If you’re just starting out the basic, Tier 1 package for $19 a month will be fine. But if you plan on doing more and want access to more features, Tier 2 is where you get the most bang for your buck.
Here’s a complete overview of what you get in each Pictory plan:
Included In ALL Pictory Plans
- 20-minute max video length for text to video
- Automatic subtitles
- Auto highlights (trailer video clips)
- B-roll
- Export subtitles (SRT and VTT)
- Automatic highlights
- Automatic visual and audio selection
- Search for similar visuals
- Set your fonts and colors
- Add logo
- Scene transition styles
- Addbranded intro and outro
- Standard library of images and videos
- Premium library of music tracks
- Upload own visuals and music tracks
- 6M+ premium licensed images and videos (Shutterstock)
- Trim video clips
- AI-based text-to-speech in different accents
- Record or upload own voiceover
- MP4 videos in 1080p
Pictory Tier 2 Plan
- 60 projects per month
- 90 minutes of video per upload (for editing)
- 2GB video file size per upload (for editing)
- 50 hours of video transcription per month
- No Pictory branding
- All Premium Plan Features
- Bulk download short video posts as CSV
- Integration with Hootsuite
Tier 2 would be the plan we recommend the most; it delivers the most value for money and the biggest potential return on investment (ROI).
Tier 3 Plan
- Unlimited projects per month
- 180 minutes of video per upload (for editing)
- 5GB video file size per upload (for editing)
- 100 hours of video transcription per month
- No Pictory branding
- All Premium Plan Features
- Bulk download short video posts as CSV
- Integration with Hootsuite
Is Pictory Worth It?
Whether you’re an established video creator or a blogger looking to expand your reach inside YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, Pictory is a brilliant tool for making your life and your content output a whole load easier and way more prolific.
If you have existing video content on your channel or blog posts on your site or, better yet, BOTH, you can use Pictory to quickly tap into things like YouTube Shorts, TikTok and other video-based social media platforms, including Facebook.
Pictory is easy to use, it doesn’t cost a lot of money (just $19 a month and there’s a free trial too), and it is jam-packed with features that enable even complete beginners to make good-looking, engaging video content. And the best part? You don’t even need to think about shooting new video, you can just use old video content, someone else’s video content, or written content from your blog.
I mean, when you look at it like that, if you’re not using this AI tool or something similar, you’re just missing out on untold amounts of branding and revenue opportunities. My advice? If you’re already a content creator or you want to be, get Pictory and start using it TODAY. The YouTube Shorts gold rush won’t last forever, so, as always, it pays to strike while the iron’s hot.
