I've used Opus before and liked it but let my subscription lapse because, well, I hate making Shorts. But I understand it's useful for social media marketing, so I decided to give Minvo a shot because it looked so promising for speeding up this part of my workflow.

I have other apps from Appsumo that have "clip" making capabilities - Taja, Chopcast, and Castmagic in particular - but Taja and Castmagic just aren't there yet in terms of editing capabilities, and I'm not even sure if Chopcast is still supported by its team.

First, the pros of Minvo:
- It's pretty good at picking out spots that are "clip-worthy." It picked out 15 separate "Moments" (their term for clips/shorts/whatever) from a 25-minute YouTube video. Of those 15, seven were good. I know 50% success doesn't sound great, but from the others I've tried, this was a good rate.

- Out of those seven, I'd say around 4 of them only needed minor tweaks

- For the 3 remaining, it was easy to change the timing to be more relevant. This was always one of my biggest frustrations with Opus; if it missed an important intro or outro, switching the timeline was impossible (I'm not sure if they've since tweaked this, though)

- I really like the ability to change framing to a 2/3, 1/3, or PiP which is great for adding visuals for more context (i.e. If I'm talking about a certain houseplant, it's great to switch frames to a 2/3rd and focus on the plant I'm talking about)

- The transcript gets it right 98% of the time. For the other 2% I can't fault Minvo for not knowing since it's usually about a strange-sounding botanical name (It had serious problems with "Colocasia" as an example)

- It's very flexible for adding in b-roll wherever you want or moving things around, which was another frustration I had with Opus.

- The "safe zone" feature that can toggle between different social media apps is really useful. It'd be great if you could switch on multiple since I'll most likely repurpose the same video across different platforms, but this isn't a dealbreaker.

Here are the cons
- SO SO SO Buggy. Good lord. I'm on a Mac using Chrome, and it is just buggy AF. The scroll is wonky, things upload only 50% of the time, and scrubbing through the timeline is not-quite-impossible but not easy, either.

- The captions are...weird. For example, it skips numbers (i.e. "60 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit" becomes " to degrees Fahrenheit") and when you DO add them in via the "Fix typos" section they only flash on the screen. There's no way to extend their time so anyone reading the captions with the sound off would most likely miss what I'm saying.

- Some menus are hidden behind strips in the layout. Like, a blank "banner bar," for lack of a better phrase, is somehow coded to be the top priority, while the account dropdown menu gets stuck behind it, making it impossible to click on.

- The emojis are really bizarre in terms of application. More than once it's overlaid 2+ emojis in the same spot.

- Deleting with right-click works 50% of the time. Heck, even activating the right-click menu is a 50/50 shot.

- Uploading b-roll only works when it feels like it. It's taken me 5+ tries to upload a picture or 2 second clip.

- Pulling the video in the timeline to get that extra word it cut off takes multiple tries.

- I think its server usage is too much for whatever is hosting this because editing at night, presumably when traffic is highest, is SO slow due to lags in processing and autosave.

- Posting to social media does not work (at least, doesn't work for me). I tried to post directly to TikTok and it said I hadn't picked a social media channel, even though TikTok was the only one I had linked so I could test.

All of the errors and issues cost me a total of 10 hours of work on seven clips. Realistically, had there been no bugs or lags, I'd estimate it should've taken me 4-5 hours for a Taja-style app and 2-3 hours in an Opus-style app.

All in all, this feels really MVP (Minimum Viable, not Most Valuable), and part of me wants to refund this solely because I feel like it's a cash grab that won't be supported for the long term. Another part of me wants to keep it in the hopes the team will take it seriously and stick with things, but I don't know.

They should've hired QA people before launching this, and I completely agree with another commenter who said it's obvious they never spoke with a video editor before launching because much of this would never have been an issue if they had.

I think I'm rooting for Minvo to keep it up, but I can't help but feeling this is going to end up another deal where the users are burned.