Vidds News February
Ed and I (Andrew) did a lot in the early days of 2021 to prepare Vidds for launching to a wider audience. We’re really excited with what we’ve done, what we have planned, and what Vidds creators will be able to do!
First up, we finished a small beta round of around 25 users. We received some excellent feedback and saw some cool uses of Vidds.
That was a bit short-lived, because we were already planning a redesign! In general, we feel that a redesign isn’t a good use of time without substantial feedback, but we had some long term problems we wanted to address…
The Big News Part 1 - A powerful new editor!
The template system we launched with was very limited. We had around 10 core templates that were hand-written in JavaScript, and we made small extensions to them to create around 40 scene designs for creators to choose from. We needed something more flexible, because writing code to create a new scene wasn’t sustainable, and it felt too restrained and limited. Our top comment during beta testing was: “Can I move this text (or image/video) somewhere else?” While we did extend the code to choose a general location for some elements, we wanted drag-and-drop for our creators!
So we went from a super basic editor where you had a couple elements you could change, to a fancy new editor where you can add and remove elements, drag and drop to reposition and resize, and even customize each animation!
Before
(Before: 3 elements, little movement)
After
(After: unlimited elements, custom positioning and animations)
There is an incredible difference already. Not only can you customize scenes, but our ready-to-go designs have much more variety! We are so excited with the new designs available, and how easy it is for us to add new ones!
(From minimalist to complex, we think it’s much easier to find a fitting design and customize it now)
The Big News Part 2 - Audio and Live Video Playback!
We’ve been wanting to build this for a while, but finally got around to it – you can now include audio from the videos you embed! Whether you want to record a quick message on your phone and embed it as a circle popup in a scene, or record a screencast or other full-size video with voice, you can now do it within the app.
In order to do this, we also needed to switch away from our old, slow, inefficient video playback method and go to live video playback. The difference is night and day as you preview a video and see the playback perfectly instead of jumpy individual frames.
This makes our video Preview button an almost perfect playback of what you’ve created (as long as your Internet connection keeps up).
With all of this smooth playback and audio support, it also became important to control the volume of background audio and the videos you embed.
And there’s more!
Here are a few additional tools we’ve added to Vidds.
- We’ve done a huge redesign of the website to make it easier to understand what we do.
- We got around to building payment plans.
- We release a new renderer that can be 2x or more faster, and more to come in render speed!
- Tools to manage your uploads and keep your media library clean.
- Added powerful options to control how a video plays back:
- Auto-calculate to play the video as a “background” for your scene.
- Full to play the entire video
- Custom Clip to select a clip from the video and change the playback speed.
- Added shape elements so you can accent your designs with circles, rectangles, and triangles.
A Parting Word
We have so much more in store!
Early on, we invested a lot of time in creating a powerful underlying core for Vidds, so now that we’re seeing what users need, we are developing new features quickly! And we’re not building features for their own sake – we want to enable creators to do more with the Vidds editor!
You can sign up for a free account to see just how it works, or follow along by subscribing to our blog and newsletter.
