VideoScribe is the Worst Piece of Software I've Ever Used
VideoScribe is the Worst Piece of Software I've Ever Used
M
Michael Claisse
On
Thu, 29 Apr, 2021 at 2:56 PM
VideoScribe is easily the worst piece of software I've ever used. It is an absolute joke. Here's why:
Constant Crashes
Probably once per week, VS just completely crashes. Sometimes the timeline glitches and I am forced to Force Quit. Other times, it just hangs on loading forever.
Logging In After a Crash
After these crashes, I have to wait 5-10 minutes to log back in. I try to log in and get an error message saying I'm already logged in on another computer/location. What?
Music MP3s must be at a specific Hz
Yep -- you read that right. If your music MP3 isn't at 44100, it won't work. For some reason, this doesn't seem to apply to your voiceover, though. Just the music. Videoscribe doesn't tell you this anywhere -- I had to google through support forums to find this out.
Rendered Files Disappear
When outputting a file, if I do not specifically select a location, the .MOV will say it has rendered, but will not exist in that (or any) location. So, say the default location is /videos, if I just leave it at that, the file will not really render. It will take several hours of rendering time, but when I go to view the file -- it's not there! However, if I go to "select location" in the output screen, and MANUALLY set it as /videos, the file does actually render. WTF?
Videoscribe won't render if the file is too long
I tried to render a 13 minute long scribe. It went through the rendering process, but then no media players could play the .MOV. The file did not work at all. After googling through support, I found that if there are too many files, or they are too big, VS won't work. WHAT? Imagine if any of the adobe video editors had that problem. VS Support will say "your files need to be optimized for VS", but that's ridiculous. Your SOFTWARE needs to be optimized to perform the basic functions it is made to do.
The longer you use VS, the slower it gets
This is bizarre. But, the longer you have VS open, the laggier and slower it becomes. This can be fixed by closing and reopening the software. WTH? Again -- imagine if any Adobe product had this issue. This is complete nonsense.
Can't import fonts
This is a basic feature that virtually all motion graphics/video editing programs have. Even other whiteboard programs have it! I don't want to use any of VS's terrible fonts. I have my own. Let me use them -- without rendering PNG files for every piece of text I have.
Can't Animate Elements without Redrawing Them
When 'animating' imported elements with the morph tool, the elements disappear while they move. Uh...okay. So, this tool is basically useless then?
It Costs More than PHOTOSHOP
After all of this, VS has the audacity to charge $35/mo for their product. WHAT? Adobe Photoshop is (I think) $22. Pretty shocking in my opinion.
Sparkol -- fix your product. It's terrible. I know for a fact I'm not the only person to have any of these issues. Videoscribe is genuinely the worst piece of software I've ever used. It feels like using something that's still in Alpha. I will never -- as long as I live -- recommend Videscribe to anyone.
Barry Radford
On
Fri, 30 Apr, 2021 at 3:35 PM
Hey there Michael, obviously we wouldn't agree with the overall assessment you've made here but it does sound like you are having a far less than positive experience. I'll address each of your points the best I can to try and help but if you would like to discuss this in more detail we will need to get our hands on some of your projects and dive into some detail so you would need to log a support ticket for that.
Constant Crashes
Consistant crashes are usually caused by the way the projects are made and following a few simple techniques and rules should drastically reduce this - see this help page
Logging In After a Crash
You can only be logged into one machine at a time. We do have a fail safe built in so where there is no logout action after a few minutes of inactivity the system will log you out. Reading and following the advice on the link in the last point should reduce this issue though.
Music MP3s must be at a specific Hz
We've been doing some testing around this in the last few weeks actually and 480000Hz seems to be a sweet spot so we'll be updating that help page shortly. The dev team are looking at this though and trying to see what can be done to expand the flexibility and consistancy of the handaling of mp3 files
Rendered Files Disappear
This is a bug in v3.6.6 of VideoScribe (which I can see you are using) on Macs and was fixed in v3.6.8 which was released back in August 2020 - upgrade your VideoScribe version and this will not happen anymore.
Can you raise a ticket on this one and send us the .mov and .scribe file via a fileshare site link in the ticket. We can take a specific look then, hard to comment without seeing the file
The longer you use VS, the slower it gets
We've done a lot about this in recent releases to improve performance, I think an update of your software will see some significant gains here
Can't import fonts
We explain our reasons for this on this forum. We switched to Google fonts in v3.6 specifically to address some long standing customer requests around language support, HD font quality and kerning.
Can't Animate Elements without Redrawing Them
This will depend on the type of imported element. Morph will only work on strokes (lines), not fills (colour). So if you are bringing in a complex photo/image as a PNG/JPG then morph will not work well. If you are creating your own SVGs from scratch then the strokes in that image will morph as any other image in our Library.
It Costs More than PHOTOSHOP
The monthly option will rack up in the longer term (can see you've been on that plan for a while), if you pay yearly the price will reduce dramatically and we do run promotions on the yearly plans periodically too which make it a very good deal. We've sent you a few offers to upgrade at a discount including a 25% off one just last week, that would have taken it down to $126 for a year rather than $420 a year paying monthly ($35x12)
VideoScribe is easily the worst piece of software I've ever used. It is an absolute joke. Here's why:
Constant Crashes
Probably once per week, VS just completely crashes. Sometimes the timeline glitches and I am forced to Force Quit. Other times, it just hangs on loading forever.
Logging In After a Crash
After these crashes, I have to wait 5-10 minutes to log back in. I try to log in and get an error message saying I'm already logged in on another computer/location. What?
Music MP3s must be at a specific Hz
Yep -- you read that right. If your music MP3 isn't at 44100, it won't work. For some reason, this doesn't seem to apply to your voiceover, though. Just the music. Videoscribe doesn't tell you this anywhere -- I had to google through support forums to find this out.
Rendered Files Disappear
When outputting a file, if I do not specifically select a location, the .MOV will say it has rendered, but will not exist in that (or any) location. So, say the default location is /videos, if I just leave it at that, the file will not really render. It will take several hours of rendering time, but when I go to view the file -- it's not there! However, if I go to "select location" in the output screen, and MANUALLY set it as /videos, the file does actually render. WTF?
Videoscribe won't render if the file is too long
I tried to render a 13 minute long scribe. It went through the rendering process, but then no media players could play the .MOV. The file did not work at all. After googling through support, I found that if there are too many files, or they are too big, VS won't work. WHAT? Imagine if any of the adobe video editors had that problem. VS Support will say "your files need to be optimized for VS", but that's ridiculous. Your SOFTWARE needs to be optimized to perform the basic functions it is made to do.
The longer you use VS, the slower it gets
This is bizarre. But, the longer you have VS open, the laggier and slower it becomes. This can be fixed by closing and reopening the software. WTH? Again -- imagine if any Adobe product had this issue. This is complete nonsense.
Can't import fonts
This is a basic feature that virtually all motion graphics/video editing programs have. Even other whiteboard programs have it! I don't want to use any of VS's terrible fonts. I have my own. Let me use them -- without rendering PNG files for every piece of text I have.
Can't Animate Elements without Redrawing Them
When 'animating' imported elements with the morph tool, the elements disappear while they move. Uh...okay. So, this tool is basically useless then?
It Costs More than PHOTOSHOP
After all of this, VS has the audacity to charge $35/mo for their product. WHAT? Adobe Photoshop is (I think) $22. Pretty shocking in my opinion.
Sparkol -- fix your product. It's terrible. I know for a fact I'm not the only person to have any of these issues. Videoscribe is genuinely the worst piece of software I've ever used. It feels like using something that's still in Alpha. I will never -- as long as I live -- recommend Videscribe to anyone.
Hey there Michael, obviously we wouldn't agree with the overall assessment you've made here but it does sound like you are having a far less than positive experience. I'll address each of your points the best I can to try and help but if you would like to discuss this in more detail we will need to get our hands on some of your projects and dive into some detail so you would need to log a support ticket for that.
Constant Crashes
Consistant crashes are usually caused by the way the projects are made and following a few simple techniques and rules should drastically reduce this - see this help page
Logging In After a Crash
You can only be logged into one machine at a time. We do have a fail safe built in so where there is no logout action after a few minutes of inactivity the system will log you out. Reading and following the advice on the link in the last point should reduce this issue though.
Music MP3s must be at a specific Hz
We've been doing some testing around this in the last few weeks actually and 480000Hz seems to be a sweet spot so we'll be updating that help page shortly. The dev team are looking at this though and trying to see what can be done to expand the flexibility and consistancy of the handaling of mp3 files
Rendered Files Disappear
This is a bug in v3.6.6 of VideoScribe (which I can see you are using) on Macs and was fixed in v3.6.8 which was released back in August 2020 - upgrade your VideoScribe version and this will not happen anymore.
https://www.videoscribe.co/Download
Videoscribe won't render if the file is too long
Can you raise a ticket on this one and send us the .mov and .scribe file via a fileshare site link in the ticket. We can take a specific look then, hard to comment without seeing the file
The longer you use VS, the slower it gets
We've done a lot about this in recent releases to improve performance, I think an update of your software will see some significant gains here
Can't import fonts
We explain our reasons for this on this forum. We switched to Google fonts in v3.6 specifically to address some long standing customer requests around language support, HD font quality and kerning.
Can't Animate Elements without Redrawing Them
This will depend on the type of imported element. Morph will only work on strokes (lines), not fills (colour). So if you are bringing in a complex photo/image as a PNG/JPG then morph will not work well. If you are creating your own SVGs from scratch then the strokes in that image will morph as any other image in our Library.
It Costs More than PHOTOSHOP
The monthly option will rack up in the longer term (can see you've been on that plan for a while), if you pay yearly the price will reduce dramatically and we do run promotions on the yearly plans periodically too which make it a very good deal. We've sent you a few offers to upgrade at a discount including a 25% off one just last week, that would have taken it down to $126 for a year rather than $420 a year paying monthly ($35x12)