As another Vidnami user, I figured that Pictory was about the closest thing to replace it with - plus it seems it has a few extra features to enhance the whole video making chore.

Well, it is a good starting point.

I have had a play around with it and made a test video from a blog article (just by entering the URL and letting Pictory pull in the text and decide on a "precis").

The "AI" chose some sentences some of which I had to change (add and take away) for the video to flow properly. A 2 minutes job so no biggie.

The auto media selection wasn't great (but it could also be hit and miss in Vidnami too) so most of my time was spent searching for better clips and images.

Then we come on to the audio. It seems like when I was testing yesterday, there were a couple of bugs

I decided to try a robot voice for this experiment. As anybody will know, you need to be able to hear what they sound like before choosing. The first bug was that, although there was a small play icon next to the voices, there was no preview. so I just chose one at random. This must have been a temporary bug as it is working today.

The second bug was when I saved and went to preview the video, there is no sound. So I still couldn't hear the finished result. So, I had to create and render the 2 minute video that seemed to take 10 - 15 minutes, download it and listen to it.

Thankfully the voice was acceptable BUT as we all know, to get them sounding natural requires having a listen and then editing the script to add or remove punctuation.

Thankfully, the preview is working properly today (although sometimes it hangs and you have to cancel and try again.

The main bugbear (which I noticed is on the roadmap) is that you can't upload a full voiceover track. Only one slide at at time. Now I LOVE the fact that you can record your voiceover one slide at a time but if I have one already done it would take a long time to split it up into loads of sentence sized audio files and upload them individually.

So a workflow like this "Blog Article > Audio in Play.ht > Video in Pictory" is impossible until this is rolled out. If it wasn't on the roadmap, that would be another taco off the plate.

Some other things I noticed...

The media (clips and images) is nowhere near as good as the choice at StoryBlocks for clips and whatever Vidnami used for images. As an example, I live in a tourist town and when I enter its name into Vidnami I am spoiled for choice with images. In Pictory - Nada. Zilch.

Sometimes the image or clip doesn't display on the slide in the editor (it is just black). I am guessing this is a bug of some sort - I saw it mentioned by another reviewer too.

Vidnami was a matured product with a wonderfully intuitive UI that was developed over years, so it is perhaps unfair to compare that with Pictory at this point.

I sincerely hope that Pictory will continue to improve and will get there in the end (and be even better).