Renderforest is an online service that helps you make videos. Using a library of stock footage and customisable 3D templates in a simple drag-and-drop interface, Renderforest enables you to create good looking corporate or personal videos instantly, or at least very quickly as some things take a moment or two to render. Either way, making videos just got easier, especially for those of you who need lots of video content but lack the technical skills to create our own assets. If you do have those skills, these templates will amp up what you can make and will save you time.
Hand-Tailored by Robots
If you are an online marketer, business owner or YouTuber, you probably need to create lots of video content. This can be costly and time-consuming, especially if you don’t have the time and talent to make the videos from scratch yourself. Not everyone has the skills necessary for good videography, but Renderforest has identified an important gap in this market: there are more people that want to make videos than have the skills to make them. For the creation of tailored logo animations, intros, product videos, explainers, and a respectable range of other templates, Renderforest has your back. The range of templates makes the service suitable for startups, long-running businesses and larger corporate concerns, where the appetite for generating media content outstrips the time or the budget to provide it.
Easy and Fun
Using the service is very easy: pick a style from the templates, upload any custom graphics (like your company logo, for example) and type in your URL, slogan or message. Hit the button and the video is rendered and ready for download. Making longer-form videos that are not logo animations is just as easy. Let’s take a look at creating a video to see how easy it is. First, select your type of animation from the templates. Let’s use the whiteboard animation toolkit to make a short video about writers. Simply click on the template to select it and add your first scene. Add a little text in the field to make your first point. When you’re happy with that, add a new scene by clicking the “+” on the timeline at the bottom. Choose the next scene from the many choices of background scenes: single character and corporate and casual styles. Repeat this process until you have your preferred length of video and amount of points you want to make. When you’ve added enough scenes and texts to make your completed video, click the next tab at the top to select your style of video. With the whiteboard toolkit you can choose from drawn-on and cutouts. I chose cutouts. Next we can choose the colour. My favourite colour is purple. Don’t judge me. Finally you get to add some music, and this is automatically tailored to the length of your video. Preview each track by clicking the play button on the left and see which track fits the mood of your video. Finally, render a preview of your finished video ready for downloading. This is free for a low-resolution video with watermark. Obviously, you should put a bit more work into the ideas and text and tweaking the scenes for a better story, but you get the idea. The 3D explainer set is another example of how deep this stuff goes. There are hundreds of customisable characters, 800 different scenes and icons, environments, video placeholders and more. Obviously the main con to this is that you have to stick within the design aesthetic which is preset for you, but the huge pro is that you have enough variety to make your 3D explainer look as though it’s not on any kind of rails. Similarly, there is a 2D video explainer toolkit containing a similar array of choices to mix and match to frame your content. So much better and more impactful than a simple slideshow. Having said that, I should mention they also have a range of slideshow templates that will be very grabby for your audience. The Diamonds slideshow pack really stood out for me, as it makes your slides look like a James Bond movie title sequence. Really very cool. The only cons are that you are limited to the range of templates that are available, and some of the more complex animations you may choose take a while to render. Not hours, but up to about ten minutes in some cases, which is fast but not instant. The pros are that it’s usually pretty fast to render, and the range is large and customisable to taste in terms of text and graphics and colour schemes, so much so that you will not run out of choices any time soon. The design style is quite varied and modern and very tasteful unlike so many of these “video by the yard” services. Similarly useful and stylish is Renderforest’s logo maker which applies the same design knowhow used in the video maker to designing logos for your company or group. This tool takes text input of what you’d like the logo to look like and ideas about font types and cranks you out a snazzy new logo in moments. Very cool.
Video by the Yard
All you need to know about Renderforest is on the video maker website, and the pricing quite fairly reflects the quality and diversity of their products, in my view. The service is free to trial and play with, but in order to use it professionally at high-resolution and without watermarks, you have to pay. If you choose to pay a lump sum annually for the lowest paid level of “Amateur,” it averages out to $14 per month. It utilizes a four-level scale sliding all the way up to “Agency” pricing which is $49 per month. The more you pay, the more videos you can make and the more music you can use, the more stock footage and vector logos you can create and so on. If you choose to pay monthly, the price goes up sharply, with Amateur being $59 per month and Agency at the top end being $129 per month. You can, however, pay singly for videos on a pay-as-you-go basis, with standard definition 360p videos costing $9.99 and 720p HD videos costing $19.99, and 1080p topping off at $29.99. I don’t think these prices are unreasonable for customised video and represent a huge savings over the thousands of dollars you can expect to pay for bespoke videos of the same quality made from scratch by professionals. So there it is, high-quality tailor-made videos without the skills or fuss of going full bespoke. If you have any questions about Renderforest or about video in general, then please don’t hesitate to leave a comment in the section below.
