FlexClip is an online video editing software. I recently took FlexClip for a test drive at the request of a YouTube viewer. Specifically, my viewer was interested in the AI tools FlexClip offers which are: AI video generation, AI video script writer, text-to-speech, background remover, AI image generator, and article URL to video generator.
Since FlexClip is a video editor, we should start with the editing functions. The layout of the editor is familiar with a big preview pane, a timeline across the bottom and the media, tools, and other goodies to the left of the preview. FlexClip didn’t try to reinvent the wheel in that regard, and that’s a good thing.
Above the preview pane is a nifty toolbar that adjusts to the item selection. Click on text and the toolbar gives you options to change the color, font, style, animation, and so on. Click an image or video and the tools in the toolbar change to the selections relevant for images or video. This toolbar is similar to Canva (very similar!) so it will be quite comfortable for Canva users.
Just about any element can be animated, using easy to understand controls and settings (again, just like Canva.) If you want the text to fly in or an image to fade in, do some kind of dance, and then fade out, you won’t have any trouble with that in FlexClip.
The text options in FlexClip are fantastic. There’s a huge variety of text styles including motion text that does all sorts of animation. Find the style you like, add it to the project, change the text to what you want, and you’re good to go.
Subtitles are easy to apply and they offer quite a few styles. However, they aren’t live-text subtitles, where the word being spoken is highlighted. It’s just all the text for a scene displayed at once.
Videos in the stock library are supplied by StoryBlocks, which is a great resource for variety and quality. BUT users of the free plan can only use ONE stock video per project. OUCH! In the first paid tier of FlexClip, users only get 5 stock videos per project.
Stock images are provided by Pexels, so the image variety is somewhat limited. The graphics in the stock library are good. Not something to get overly excited about, but not disappointing either. I found the effects, filters, and transitions to be just OK as well. FlexClip doesn’t have the trendy new stuff you’d find in CapCut but it’s also not super-generic either.
Now for the AI stuff…
The text to speech voices are not impressive. I didn’t get to try out too many of them with my text, since the limits on the free plan are extremely low and I hit them quickly just trying to figure things out! But I was able to play the samples of all of them. Som had trouble with pronouncing the words in their sample script. Some just sounded like early AI voices, and one of them I’m certain I’ve heard in countless videos all over the internet.
The AI video generator was fast. Faster than any other AI generator I’ve tested. But it produced scenes that were too long for my liking (I want a short sentence per scene, not a paragraph) and it didn’t seem to ‘get’ the instructions.
I used one of its example prompts which led to a video of the 10 things to see in Iceland. Then, it asked me how long the video should be. The options were short, medium, and long, with no definition of what any of those meant. I picked short and, when it generated the video, it included only 6 things to see. By the way, short is very short! Some of the things it selected came with no explanation or elaboration while other parts of the video were extra wordy.
I can understand that it couldn’t get detailed on 10 destinations in a short video. But it could have warned me that short means tiny, or it could have adjusted the title and went for a more realistic number based on the length, like maybe 3 destinations.
The AI image generator offers about a dozen different styles of image, but not photo-realistic. I asked for an image of a beautiful woman on the beach on a sunny day. One of the images was zoomed in on the woman’s collarbones. Her head, arms, and everything below her bikini top were cropped out. The other image actually showed the beach, but it had the woman barely on the far right side of the image, with a good bit of her cut off.
The AI video script writer was decent. I feel like the results were about as good as what you can get from any of the free chatbots. But you can guide the chatbots to tailor everything about the script to your vision.
I took an article from this website and pasted the link into the URL to video generator. FlexClip didn’t summarize the article. It didn’t paraphrase. It just selected a handful of sentences – one or two from each paragraph and put them all together as the script. That approach is interesting, and I don’t think I’m a huge fan of it. It also did a horrible job of selecting relevant video clips or images to go with the scenes it created from the script. With about a dozen scenes, there wasn’t a single image or video clip that was even remotely relevant.
Lastly, the background remover only removes the background from images… not videos. Granted, it did a fabulous job. But removing the background from videos has become a standard feature in video editors and FlexClip is limited to background removal on still images only.
FlexClip isn’t something I’ll be using anytime soon. I think it has potential because they’ve done a great job with their editor layout and usability, including tons of excellent text motion assets, and being very fast. If they can improve their AI generative stuff (by a few generations) it could be a really awesome tool.
