Premium Solution at a Premium Price
April 08, 2022
Premium Solution at a Premium Price
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vyond (formerly GoAnimate)
Vyond is our solution when we need to make explainer videos. I've created explainer videos with Vyond for high-level product info and for leadership and other general business topics.
- It easily allows you sync the animated characters lips to your narration
- It allows you to make explainer videos in different styles -- whiteboard style and two different non-whiteboard "cartoon" styles
- It's easy to import your own images
- It's easy to add and manage background music
- It comes with a decent-sized library of assets and scenes (although less so for the whiteboard style than the other styles)
- Desperately needs visibility toggles and ability to work with layers
- Needs the ability to name objects in the timeline
- There are no back views of characters -- you have to kind of fake it up, hiding the face with a shape the color of the hair, etc.. Also, no full side views, either....even when you use the "facing right" or "facing left" options, the character is looking more towards the "camera" than towards, say, the character they're supposed to be talking to.
- The Business style (and, I assume, the Contemporary style) can't handle very long videos...after about 100 scenes, you need to break it up into another piece and then later knit the two pieces back together. It would be nice if there was a built-in utility for cutting up the video and knitting video pieces together (without re-rendering the video and causing it to greatly increase in file size).
- Needs emphasis effects for objects and text, like blinking. Also, or change color effect (so I don't have to make two copies and use instant entrance/exit technique) for emphasis or other purposes
- Multiple motion paths for one object within a scene or squiggly motion path or motion path with more than one "stop."
- No closed captioning! Need to publish the video file to a platform that will allow you to add closed captioning post-production. This is an accessibility issue.
- No whiteboard characters with shaded skin (or a way to make that) to increase diversity.
- Ease of use
- Effectiveness at imparting certain types of content
- It passed internal IT, Legal, and Purchasing reviews, so it must be relatively secure (in terms of storing sensitive data) and the company must be relatively stable.
- Anecdotal evidence points to positive reception from the employees who view these videos, so they are likely to actually watch them to the end, etc.
- We don't really measure very robustly this kind of thing, since it's not meant to be used for critical skills/knowledge learning on its own.
- It saves time for the developer over trying to create a similar thing in a tool like PowerPoint or Captivate or Camtasia, because it has so much built-in functionality and assets for creating these types of videos. It also has a shallower learning curve, which also saves new developers some time.
Vyond is WAY better than VideoScribe (although, to be fair, it's also about six times more expensive)! It's much easier to work with and more versatile in terms of styles and what you can do with it. We used VideoScribe for a few years and then ditched it and went looking for a replacement tool. Another application was being used by another learning developer, but that was nixed by IT as not being secure enough. Vyond has given us both the functionality/assets we need and the security that makes IT happy.
Do you think Vyond delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Vyond's feature set?
Yes
Did Vyond live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Vyond go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Vyond again?
Yes