Rocketium 2020 Review and Discount

The Video Creation Process

Rocketium has a large number of features and is almost a full-fledged online video editor, but with these tons of features come tons of problems.

Let's take a look at the good first & and I'll intersperse all of the problems throughout the review.

Templates

Like with most video-makers it all starts with the templates.

However, I personally prefer starting from scratch as the templates are quite short and only useful for very short videos. 

When creating your video you can use different templates on a per slide/scene basis so there's no point in selecting them here.

They don't have a very high number of video templates, but they do have a larger number of scene templates.

The Editor

This is what the editor looks like:

Pretty simple, right? 

Well... Things can get complicated pretty fast. (But more on that later)

The first step is making sure you're in the right aspect ratio. Rocketium allows you to create videos of pretty much all ratios for all social media platforms, but not every plan has access to every type of image. 

There is an overlay over the Storyblocks videos that's gone once the video is rendered.

You also have the choice of searching the "Premium" media library and purchasing them at a 50% discount or only using the 17,000,000 images and videos library that you get for free.

You can trim each video you add, which isn't crucial, but a useful feature to have.

As for music: it's basically the same as every other video maker out there.

Slide Templates

The next step is adding new slides.

You can either add a blank slide or use one of their many slide templates.

There's a LOT of them, and most, but not all of them, are beautiful.

Some are blurry and have low resolution (which might be useful if you're creating 480P videos, but 1080P is pretty much the current standard.)

Editing Text

Just like in a blog post they have two types of text: Heading and Body.

Each scene can have as much text as you want or you can add another scene with a new video and new text.

You are supposed to be able to add individual media within scenes also, but I was unable to get that feature to work.

The text is pretty simple, but they have a lot of "hidden" features that are only available by adding them through their store (even though the features are free.)

I'll talk more about the store later, but for now here's what that looks like: 

The text can be moved around to wherever you want and you can of course change the font and the size of it.

Text animations are pretty self-explanatory: this is how the text "flies in" or appears. There are a total of 32 animations.

Effects are similar to animations, but instead of being applied to the text, it's about what additional objects appear in the background.

So you might have a text animation of the text sliding in from the left combined with a text effect of a colorful background or some rectangles sliding it to add an additional feeling of motion.

This is an example of ones that actually work:

And this is what it looks like with text. A bit weird without the motion, but looks good with motion:

But there are some that don't work at all or look very strange:

Editing Scenes/Media

They also have similar features for editing slides. A lot of them are "hidden" and you have to add them by going to the store, but they're free so I count these as included features. 

My assumption is they don't want to overwhelm new buyers with so many options so they just include the crucial ones.

They have separate media & scene animations:

And they also have frames. Frames are pretty cool, but they don't always work and the colors can't be edited. 

Voiceover & Timing

You can add a voice over on a per-slide basis, but there's only one problem: the longest voiceover you can have is 120 seconds.

This means that if you want a video with a much longer VO, you would have to cut it up into different pieces which is annoying.

You can, of course, upload it as a "music track," but then you lose the benefit of having background music. 

This is what the editor looks like:

And you can change the timing for all elements of the video. The media, the subtitles, etc.

Letterbox/Subtitle Videos

Since letterbox videos perform so well on social media, it's crucial for any tool you're looking at to have this feature.

Rocketium has it. Sort of.

They have templates for letterbox videos:

But if you're only using one video as the background, you'll have to limit yourself to one scene or mess around with the video timings.

And if you have a background voiceover then the limit per slide is 120 seconds which can be a bit annoying.

Article to Video

They do have an Article -> Video "feature," but it's basically a glorified copy & paste tool.

All it does it import the text into the tool so then you can quickly add it to each scene. Since the tool doesn't automatically pick videos or images or automatically format things, this isn't that valuable.

The Store

They have a lot of features that are hidden away in their "store."

I put "store" in quotes because everything in the store is currently free.

I'm assuming they're planning on eventually creating a marketplace for freelancers to sell their own add-ons, but right now it's basically additional free Rocketium features.

Not all of the features work perfectly and there are some glitches, but this is nice to have. 

What's Good

• Large number of scene templates
• Can edit pretty much every aspect of the video from timing to transitions to position
• Large number of features
• Media library is similar to pretty much every other tool out there

What's Not So Good

• Some glitches & not all features are fully fleshed out.
• Some templates are low quality
• 120 second maximum VO length
• The 1080P plan is pretty expensive compared to other tools. 
• Arbitrary separation between pricing plans
• Low number of features for the cheaper plans
• The article -> video feature is basically a glorified copy & paste tool.

Pricing & Discounts

They have 3 plans, which are all pretty pricy, but the distinctions between the plans seem arbitrary.