Easy video creation is always popular, and there's a nice new tool that helps you do just that. Lumen5 is a tool that will create a video from a blog post. It's very simple to use - just create an account and link to the blog post that you're interested in. I suppose you could link to any of them, you don't need to be the blog owner, but that's the logical thing to do, so we'll go from there. Lumen5 then loads the text of the blog post into a side window. You can highlight individual sentences which you can then quickly edit, re-position on the page and so on. Lumen5 then pops the text on the screen, and you can add in a background image, either one you upload or that you can choose from a range of free to use images. Go onto the next sentence and repeat. You can move each 'slide' up and down as necessary, and preview the finished video until you're happy with it. You can then choose from their range of free music to add to the video as well. Once you're done, you can render it, share it to Facebook and download it in mp4 format. It's also available on the web, though not in a particularly user friendly style, but it's perfectly viewable. My short test piece is available at https://lumen5.com/v/ewc5/
As you would expect, there are commercial versions available starting it $49 a month, which is well out of the reach of most of us. However, you can make use of the free version with unlimited videos, but the output is limited to 480p video quality. That's certainly most that the vast majority of us will use. It's worth checking out, because it's very quick and easy to use. The version below is the same one that I've linked to in the previous paragraph. It took me about 10 minutes to make, and most of that was spent scrolling through the different images available to me.
