One of the biggest struggles when it comes to video creation for digital signage is finding the right tools. Without those tools, keeping your signage updated with the best possible content can become a challenge. Unfortunately, most of us don't have the luxury of a full-time team of graphic designers and video producers to keep our signs fresh and on point. However, with some of the platforms and tools available today, you can quickly create and freshen promotional video content with no previous graphic or video experience.
Looking for ideas? Check out our post, Tips for Creating the Best Digital Signage Video Content.
Top 8 Tools for Video Creation for Digital Signage
1. Canva
canva.com
Cost: Free, $12.99/month
Canva is best known for making it easy to create graphics for the web, email, and even print. From social media posts to postcards and posters, Canva has pre-made templates to help anyone create beautiful designs.
However, not everyone knows about their promotional video templates. Just pick a template from their list of categories and customize it with your own text and graphics. You can even upload your own video clips to incorporate into the template. You will end up with a professional-looking animated video ready to load and display on your signage.
Templates are available in categories like explainer, marketing, real estate, food, fashion, travel, and more. With an upgrade to the premium plan, you will unlock thousands of more templates and the ability to upload and use your company branding kit to customize your creations.
Their free plan has everything you need to get started. However, upgrading to their pro plan adds quite a few benefits, including access to a much larger pool of templates, photos, videos, audio, and graphics. It also has tools designed to make it easier to work with other members of your team.
2. Renderforest
renderforest.com
Cost: Free, Various plans from $6.99 to $49.99/month
Renderforest markets itself as an all-in-one branding platform. You can create company logos, graphics, and even websites. Their video templates feature a powerful digital signage video maker. You can quickly and easily create content from templates in five main categories: animation videos, intros and logos, slideshows, presentations, and music visualizations.
They also offer complete toolkits for creating more in-depth projects like full explainer videos and whiteboard animations. Renderforest even offers more advanced features like "Script to video," which uses AI to generate a custom video using your script.
Renderforest's free plan has some limitations, including a maximum resolution of 360p and a top length of three minutes for videos and a Renderforest watermark. Each upgraded package removes the watermark and adds better resolutions, longer video length, access to more stock videos, and the ability to upload your own fonts.
3. Promo
www.promo.comCost: $12/month – $199/month
Promo is a video creator platform focused mainly on online videos. However, it still has solid potential for video creation for digital signage. With over 4000 templates easily searchable by category, you can easily find what you need for your signage strategy. In addition to templates, Promo gives users access to 15,000,000 premium video clips, a fully licensed music library, and simple DIY editing tools.
Promo does not offer a free plan, but they do offer a free trial. Their paid plans offer starter, business, and agency tiers. The business tier opens an additional 4000 templates, and the agency tier is for those working with multiple clients. The starter plan would likely work well for those just looking for a digital signage video maker.
4. Wave.video
wave.video
Cost: Free, $24/month, $48/month
Offering an easily searchable collection of templates, Wave.video provides plenty of tools and templates to make easy work of video creation for digital signage. The platform offers hundreds of templates, many of which will inspire some creative digital signage ideas. You can easily create listicle videos, customer testimonials, product demos, event promotions, and more. You can also upload and edit your own video, meaning Wave can be your one-stop digital signage video maker.
Wave.video is different from the others listed here in that they also promote their video hosting service. Because of this, their free plan may not work well for digital signage since you cannot download the files. On the other hand, their creator plan allows users to download MP4 files. It also opens an additional 8 million royalty-free clips and images.
5. Animoto
animoto.com
Cost: Free, $15/month, $39/month
Animoto promotes its platform as making video creation as simple as possible. Just choose a template, drag and drop photos and video clips, customize fonts and transitions, and, if desired, add music. They offer templates in five categories: social trends, business, promo videos, celebrations, and personal.
In addition, they offer millions of photos, video clips, and graphics free to use in your productions. One of the best features of Animoto is its extensive getting started guides and videos. They assume users have no previous experience and demonstrate precisely how to put together your own professional-looking video. This means you can be a pro at video creation for digital signage in just minutes.
Animoto does offer a free plan, but it adds the Animoto watermark to all productions. Their professional plan allows you to remove their watermark and replace it with your own, plus opens up over a million photos and videos from Getty Images.
6. InVideo
invideo.io
Cost: $15/month – $60/month
InVideo may have one of the fastest methods of video creation for digital signage out there. With this service, you can create your digital signage video in under five minutes. Just add an image, select your colors, add your text, and you are done.
Of course, like the others, there are also templates available easily searchable by type or theme. Video also has a feature to convert your copy to a video. Just choose a template, paste your text, and watch InVideo create a professional-looking video. It will create a separate scene for each sentence of your copy and automatically add images, text boxes, and even audio. You can then adjust everything in the editor until it is exactly the way you want it.
InVideo offers a free trial to check out the platform. Their lower-priced business plan does have some limitations as to the number of clips you can use and the number of videos you can export each month. However, these limitations may not be an issue for most people using the platform for digital signage.
7. Placeit
Cost: Free, $14.95/month
Placeit is an online design tool and video creator that has a good number of promo video templates (over a 1,000 at the time of writing) that can be easily customized to fit your brand.
The majority of the promo video templates are focused on the clothing brand niche but they have templates that fit many other categories including education, fitness, technology, and many others. They also strongly focus on social platforms however, the templates can be modified to fit well digital signs.
It's very easy to find the templates you're after on Placeit using their searching and filtering options, and customizing their predesigned templates is just as simple. So you can have a some quality promotional videos ready to go in no time.
There are quite a few Placeit alternatives but not too many websites have the same mix of templates and tools that you can utilize to promote your brand.
8. Biteable
biteable.com
Cost: Free, $19/month, $49/month
In addition to an extensive collection of pre-made templates to work with, Biteable also offers more than 800,000 video clips to use to create custom videos. Just choose a video and add it to your storyline. You can add text, graphics, audio, and more videos or images. This has enormous potential as a digital signage video maker. You can quickly turn text announcements into beautiful animated videos that will easily catch peoples' attention.
Biteable does offer a free tier, but it includes a Biteable watermark and limited video resolution. Their Plus plan removes those limitations. Their Ultimate level adds several additional benefits, including 17.7 million premium clips from Shutterstock.
Make Scheduling Your Content a Breeze with OptiSigns
Once you have chosen the right digital signage video maker for your needs, loading and scheduling your content is fast and easy with OptiSigns. OptiSigns take you through every step, including getting your signs up and running. They even offer preconfigured devices that you can just plug into your displays and get started right away.
From there, you can just upload your images and videos to the cloud, create playlists and schedules, and then sit back and let the software take care of your digital signs. Learn more about Creating Schedules here.
