I have been on a kick lately to find free video creator studios on the internet. My problem with the ones that I am finding is that they want money! noooooo!

If you have been here before you probably know that I am cheap and don’t like to pay for something unless it ROCKS! See my PowToon post to read more on that end.

The two most recent acquisitions to my Google Apps have been WeVideo and Wideo (I know they sound almost the same!). Both of these advertise themselves as free online video makers so, naturally, I added them to my apps to check them out for you, my internet friends!

Similarly to PowToon, there are some fees if you start wanting to take too much credit for what you create with their tools. 😀

Wideo allows free embedding and free linking to your video (which has their branding on it). To upload to YouTube, you must purchase a subscription, or pay $49 for a one time upload. The same rules apply for downloading and getting rid of their branding. This rules Wideo useless to me right now, as I am not willing to subscribe to their service, pay a one time download fee, or go around their back to illegally download what I create (though you could probably do this…but would it be worth it?).

Wideo is pretty cool in that, like PowToon, you can animate from a library of their images (these images are where the fees come from, I’m sure!). You can be a little more detailed with your animations and make the images move across the screen in a customized way which is entertaining and could potentially make for some engaging content videos. All in all, the price tag is too steep for me, and I am fundamentally opposed to subscribing to this sort of service unless I know I will be using it A LOT and EVERY MONTH.

WeVideo is not an animators studio, but is a video editor with some effects that you can add in. At first glance, this appears to be a great way to avoid paying for an app like iMovie (as they do similar jobs). HOWEVER, you only get 5:00 minutes TOTAL of export video, and this video has a watermark on it. I played with it, and used 4:29 of my 5:00 minutes. You can export for free to YouTube, but every minute of export counts towards your total, even if you delete the video from WeVideo. Right now, for $9 you can get 60 minutes of export time, but since it is so similar to iMovie and iMovie is, in my opinion, a better program, I will not be joining in on the WeVideo service.

My initial excitement about this post is waning right about now, since I have not found something new to use (that is right for me), but hopefully I can save YOU some time and frustration with these products. Unless, of course, you are looking for a subscription service and choose one of these!