Doodle Maker Review: Brutally Honest

 hello and welcome to this review of doodlemaker  first thing i'm going to do is sign in so when   you sign in you land at this page which is  homepage and it's just got news that never   really gets updated what i'm going to do today is  i'm going to talk about doodlemaker why i think   it's good and more importantly why i think it's  bad now you might disagree with what i think is   bad and you might just see the good in it but  it's become a really polar piece of software   had i reviewed this last week i would have said  it's all good and i probably would have given it   four stars out of five this week because i found  an issue i would give it a lower mark but we'll   talk about that in a moment you can get rid of  this if you want but you might as well keep it up   you've got lots of things down this side the main  thing is your projects really these other things   aren't that important now i will say i have the  dulux version and we'll talk more about what you   get in the deluxe version later and i do want  to say this is roughly 47 for the basic version   and then there's a small upgrade to go to deluxe  version so if you want to get doodlemaker it costs   67 but of course you can get 18 off which is going  to take it to 49 i think that's a fair price and   it comes with 30 day money back guarantee so  you can try it out and it is a good piece of   software and we're going to look at why it's  a good piece of software now so we're back in   doodle maker and the first thing you're going to  want to do is click create a project so you can   use a ready-made template you can start from  scratch or you can import a video and it will   apparently build slides but i don't think this is  very good the ready-made templates i don't think   are very good i generally build mine from scratch  but we're gonna look at the ready-made templates   so they're like all these pieces of software  and i have reviewed quite a lot of these types   of software they're niche based and i  never find a niche that i can fit into   so if we look at this one car dealership let's  have a look what's made with the car dealership okay so you get the idea you can make better than  that yourself so that's what i mean about the   templates aren't that good i don't really think  they're that good they save you time you'd have   to pick the specific one for you and i don't know  that there are enough ones to cover everyone so if   we go back to my projects you can see i've done a  lot of videos here i've got three pages of videos   and i use these for making short little  ads for facebook short ads for twitter to   promote my podcast so let's look at this one  i'm going to go to edit here so this is just   to promote my recent episode episode 131 yes  i've made that many episodes and i'm going to   click on preview so you can see what it does  the preview is a little bit slow to generate so what's really good about this is it doesn't  take very long to put together it looks pretty   good it's a very small file size to download and  then upload and you can also add speech and sound   to this really easily so you wouldn't have now  to hear this when i showed it because i've got   my microphone plugged in which means i don't  really end up recording system audio but we   had music playing you also wouldn't have been able  to hear that i had someone reading out so we can   add text for people to read out you can upload  your own voice or you can record a voiceover   but by far the easiest thing to do is to type  in what you want to say and then click save text   and then pick from the tts which is text to speech  voices so i'm gonna obviously pick an english one   but you can go and change the language if you want  i generally pick english mail i find that's the   best but you can have ones with accents you can  also change your language you can change the speed   if you think it goes very fast or very slow or you  want it to slow down so that's really good and you   can test out your speech here so that's really  good so we can insert elements so this is text   and i'm just going to click off it if i want to  insert text i click here and i type the text out   here i can pick different fonts but i think prime  is the best change the size type my text out here   for some reason i need to click this box which i  never used to and then i click insert and the it   goes in the middle now i can move it around i can  readjust it and it readjusts flawlessly i guess   it's um a vector so yep it readjusts flawlessly  and i can move it around and so what i can do   is i can change the transition here so i can have  hand drawing those tend to get a bit bit boring so   i generally have a slide in as well so i might  slide in from the left with a hand i can change   the palette here i will keep it black and i can  change the speed of the transition i normally have   it about one second and of course you can stack  things by moving them backwards which doesn't   seem to work or moving it forwards i don't know  why that's not working but it doesn't work so if   i preview this now what i'm going to do as well  is i'm going to just move it to the top it's the   eighth one to come in so i'm going to click here  and unlock this timeline and i'm going to move   this all the way up to the top reset the timeline  and i'm going to click preview what's useful is   it gives you your talk duration and your drawing  duration which is useful so you can see hands are   drawing stuff but my one slide in so let's just  watch that again watch it slide in from the left okay so i'm going to get rid  of that and it just tells me   the voice and the drawing are not equal there so  that's really useful but what i can do as well   is i can change the language here and i can do  some auto translation i've never used this feature   and i can import a variety of different icons so  you can upload your own ones or you can search   for things now there are loads of icons and it's  good that you can search so i might want to do   fairgrounds no icons for that  i might want to do subscribe   and we've got buttons so again i just click and  it's here i reap i can reposition i can resize it   etc i've got icon i've got i can find i've got  assets i've got characters it's very difficult   to know what to search for so if i search for a  dentist or something comes up that's quite useful   i can upload i can search pixabay photo  bin whatever jump story is i don't know so   i've got access to loads and loads of icons and  assets and they're all free which is really good   i can change my style of hand i generally have  this one or that one but i can change the style of   hand which is useful so you can add a soundtrack  and you just pick it pick whichever one you want   and you can preview it now what's really good  is that obviously i picked a soundtrack that's   one minute 50 seconds but this is only about 14  seconds it's the program stops wherever you get   to so it doesn't go on for another one minute 36  which is really useful so it knows when to stop   and i don't think i mentioned that this is a web  application so what that means is you can use it   on any device i use it quite a lot on a chromebook  which is really really useful i guess you could   use it on a tablet but i've not tried so we've got  backgrounds now i generally use the whiteboard but   you can change it to a blackboard you can change  it to a glassboard is just the other way around   you can change it to its own color or you can  use an image that's really good as well you can   add in a watermark now i've never been able to  get a watermark to work so i've uploaded a logo   and it normally puts a watermark there and  you can move it about but it hasn't always   worked brilliantly and then we've got settings  which don't really do very much the settings   so when we're ready we click create video and  it will take you back to your projects page and   you'll see sort of a circle go around and then  when it's ready you can download it now if you   buy the deluxe edition you get more assets and  you get priority rendering but i did not notice   a difference between priority rendering and not  priority rendering it seemed to take just as long   so i've made some great little videos and you  can see some of those as i'm talking i made some   great little clips and they worked really well on  twitter and they worked really well on facebook   they look really professional they sound really  good i don't have to record a voiceover because   i can just do text-to-speech so it means  you can generate them really quickly so   for that i would give this you know four stars  out of five it does have its issues it is a bit   fiddly and i'm gonna go back here and talk about  some of the issues so you can add slides fantastic   you can add as many slides as you want but you  can't reorder the slides which is a bit of a pain   sometimes you can add an asset and it comes across  in the wrong color or it doesn't quite scale very   well so if i search for soundcloud i need to  go to icon finder if i search for soundcloud   i've got all these um soundcloud graphics  which is fantastic but if i use this one   that doesn't quite look how it did  in the picture and if i expand it it's not really that good so some of the assets   are really good some of them aren't so good  so if i were to do soundcloud this one would   probably be better for soundcloud the bars  are much better again let's pick soundcloud i'm i found i don't know why that's  so small i mean that's ridiculous i've got to make it incredibly big just to get it  to a suitable size but there have been times when   i've used colored ones and they've come out black  and they haven't reproduced the way they should   so that can happen there's also no alignment tools  which is a shame now i was talking about alignment   there's no way other than sort of just judging by  eye to align these it'd be really good if there   are some alignment text the rendering for the  file sizes you get it does take a very long time   there's no way to change the frame rates used  there's no copy and paste you can't favorite   your assets the ones you use a lot you've just got  to go and search for them and remember their name   there's no keyboard shortcuts and the previewing  takes a long time but if we look past those   for 47 or 49 then this is a great  piece of software for what it does   it's a lot cheaper than the alternative  software and it does pretty much the same   but and there's a big but and this is why i would  downgrade my opinion of it you'll notice here   there's no download button and there's no  download button because there's an error and   this is an unfixable error so i made this and  now i've got loads of slides and i spent eight   years getting things where i wanted them this  is for another channel so all these slides work but when i get to i think the eighth slide  there's an error on it let's have a look   yeah there's an error current slide has some error  please contact support team so i can't go and do   anything all i can do is click ok takes me back  to my project so there's an error on it and it   means if i clicked to create the video it would  spin round forever and it never makes the video   available for download so i'm a bit stuck now i  put all this effort in i can't go and delete this   slide because when i click on it that comes up i  can delete other slides so if i go to slide nine   this is just another slide i added i can add here  and i can delete here and that'll get rid of it i   can't reorder the slides as i said before but i'm  stuck on this problem so i can't fix it myself   it says contact support when you contact  support they say right we can fix it but we need   your login details we need your email and your  password and we'll go and fix it for you now i'm   not going to give my email and my password over  to a support team even if they do own the software   i'm not going to give that information out maybe  you will give that information out maybe you're   fine giving that information out but i'm not  happy to give that information out and therefore   all that time i spent making this i would have  to go and give out my password to get it fixed   and i'm not going to do that so that's a wasted  effort that's massively changed how i look at   this piece of software now and it has left a sour  taste in my mouth i'm not very happy with it and   i will be considering whether i got a refund or  not so let's talk about the things down the side   i've got dulux and what does deluxe give you gives  you a template every month i'm not bothered about   that gives you more voices i only ever use  one voice gives you more background files   gives you more characters as video scripts not  going to use that you get priority vip rendering   as i've said i didn't notice a difference at  all and you get software updates so you can   probably get away with with not getting the dulux  version there's this thing called white label   what you can do is you can set up  a brand and you can go and sell   to other people doodle maker under your own  branding i haven't used this yet so i can't   talk about it but equally now that i've found this  problem that your slides don't work under certain   conditions and you can't solve it unless you  get the support team to log in someone's logging   credentials i'm not sure i'd want to sell this  because if they encounter that problem i would   have to ask them for the same thing and pass it  on to a third party i'm not really happy to do   that you've got tuned video here an autumn video  is is just a another way to make these animated   explainer videos now interestingly i have done a  review of that and if it's published now you can   connect to it in the card here is a client engine  and i haven't bought this i don't know what it is   but it's another thing they sell you and here  are some training videos where it's good that   you can access them in-app and they are fairly  useful frequently asked questions section and the   email address for support so that is doodlemaker  in a nutshell as long as you don't get any errors   it's a very good piece of software but once  you get an error you're going to have to give   over your login credentials to get it resolved  which is not for me but i've been making loads   and loads of really short really engaging little  explainer videos or clip videos or question videos   that have been sort of under 20 seconds this is  such a good piece of software for making that   because you can make them incredibly quickly it's  cheap you can churn them out really quickly you've   got sound you've got a voice you can add to it  you can do voiceovers you've got loads of assets   i don't know where they come from but you've got  loads of assets there are problems with this piece   of software some assets not reproducing properly  some appearing different on screen to how they do   in the search just annoying things like you can't  reorder the slides you can't do any alignments   there are no alignment tools rendering takes a  long time but they're minor niggles so i would   give this four stars out of five but because of  the issue where there's a problem on the slide   and you can't resolve it yourself i think i'd  probably give this two out of five because that   is a big issue for me let me know what you think  though would you buy doodle maker based on the   review i've given is the privacy issue enough  to put you off as well do let me know in the   comments below and do check out my other videos  about these type of softwares thank you goodbye

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