After a few hours of video creation, I am becoming intimately familiar with the limitations of PowToon's software.
It's clear to me now that this is meant to be an upgraded Powerpoint with the capacity to animate a few things, not a straight-up animation software. The options for graphics, transitions, and animations are very limited, especially in the free account. Often the effect or picture I want simply isn't there. There are groups of "styles", only a few of which are available to non-paying users, and if I want a graphic that is in another "style" group I can't change the color of it at all...meaning that if I'm using all-white graphics in my main style, and I want a graphic that is only available in another style and it happens to be black, I can't simply make it white. This might make my video look a little scattered...but whatever. I've done my best to make the colors and design cohesive, there's not much I can do about it now.
Recording the voiceover was also a pain. I quickly discovered that the voiceover must be one long file, rather than a separate voiceover for each slide, which made the recording much more difficult as I had to restart the whole thing if I made a mistake. The quality of the recording was also not good, despite my best efforts to find the quietest possible place in my home. I tried to use my laptop's audio software and just upload the file, but it kept "buffering" for so long that I just gave up. Instead, I had to record myself using PowToon's mic recorder, which (as already mentioned) resulted in poor sound quality.
I also found out that the maximum length for each slide is 20 seconds. This has been my greatest challenge of all, as it forced me to break up my slides into smaller sections than I wanted to...in some cases, I need a separate slide for each sentence of my script. I am not pleased.
Despite these challenges, I continue to plug away at this video, and look forward to finally turning it in tomorrow.
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