Looking back: 50 Significant Improvements or Features we implemented last year

The list of chosen 50 features or improvements

1. Automatic captions generator

This is what started it all. In the beginning, ContentFries was just a captions-generating tool we were using in-house to speed up and improve our content creation processes.

Then it hit me. What if we build on top of it and add features to help us with the most time-consuming tasks we do in a video editor?

The vision became clear. Help content creators like us save as much time as possible. We quickly created the first early version and it went public shortly after.

The problem was that the initial version was not very stable, nor was it generating precise captions. Not only that, but the automatic captions system was also often skipping words.

All of these issues were resolved and today we generate automatic captions for videos online with very high precision for more than 120 languages and dialects.

2. Captions editor

This was one of the most significant development challenges we faced. It combines all the captions features like text to speech synchronization, captions presets, speaker recognition, and more to the simple-to-use captions editor.

On top of that you can export your captions in srt, vtt, or plain text file. You can skip the automatic captions generation process and import your captions in any supported format, or paste the video script and let it sync with the audio and create captions out of it in no-time.

3. Speaker recognition

ContentFries can automatically detect and mark all the people speaking in your video, so you can differentiate between them by a different color if you wish.

4. Captions presets

You can split your captions by pre-defined captions presets like splitting captions by every third word, or update how many lines or characters you wish to have per caption and let ContentFries automatically retime all your captions automatically.

5. Timings

Update caption timings on the timeline with drag & drop or use advanced captions editor to make timings automatically by settings of your choice.

6. History

If you make a mistake or in case anything goes wrong, you can roll back your captions to any point you wish.

7. Compressed mode

Compressed mode provides you with a focus mode that hides all the unnecessary options, so you can edit your captions as a text document.

8. Sync text to speech

ContentFries can sync text with the speech to save you as much time as possible, so you don't have to lose time on timing captions manually.

9. Individual captions settings

By pressing the gear icon you can change the settings of any particular caption and highlight it with a different color if you wish.

10. Captions best practices and metrics

ContentFries includes important metrics like characters per line (CPL) or characters per second (CPS) to keep your captions easy to read and follow.

11. Emoji support

You can add an emotional charge to your videos by adding an emoji to your headline. It is fully customizable, so you can place it anywhere you want, change its rotation, or even the time when it should appear in your video.

12. Rotation

Change the rotation of texts, elements, emojis, or images and create unique and engaging videos for social.

13. Color picker

Great and user-friendly color picker that provides you with a predefined library of beautiful color picker made by us. You can also pick a color out of your screen, or apply color in hexadecimal format.

14. Font family library

Huge library of hundreds of beautiful fonts. Find a font you like and apply it to headlines or captions.

15. Custom fonts

Upload custom font in .otf, .ttf, or other supported formats.

16. Backdrops

Apply a backdrop (customizable color background) to captions, headlines, or the progress indicator. You can change its opacity and by doing so create a really fancy effect if you apply an image or mirror background.

17. Customisable text shadows

Change the color of the text's shadow or its opacity.

18. Smart elements resizer

One click to resize images or elements to cover or contain your scene.

19. Elements drag & drop

Reposition the elements in your video wherever you want just by plain and simple drag & drop or use the X and Y draggers to adjust the position manually.

20. In-scene elements resizer

Resize supported elements by dragging & dropping any of the corners.

21. Elements speed optimizations

Significant speed optimizations provide a better user experience without the need for a high-end pc to edit videos.

22. Stock media library

Choose an image from a broad library of millions of free stock images provided by Pexels.

23. Images uploads

Upload your logo / photo / watermark in .jpg, .png, or .svg format and apply it to your video in no time.

24. Transitions support

Apply in and out transition—currently supported only for images, but we're finishing transitions support for other elements as well.

25. Element timings

Set when a specific element / headline / text / image should appear in your video.

26. Positions grid

One click to select where your element / image should be located.

27. Keyboard shortcuts

Save more time by using keyboard shortcuts as TAB for video play, shift+arrows for modifying elements location, and more.

28. In-app guides

Click on the "Guides" button to quickly find answers to frequently asked questions.

29. Onboarding wizards

Onboarding wizard can guide you through the basics of the context editor and trimmer in no time.

30. Templates system

Create as many templates as you want or choose a template from the ever-growing library of system templates. Go to the "Fry boxes" section to copy system templates to your account so you can modify them to your liking.

31. Multi-context templates

Templates support context—that means you can use one template which may look differently for Facebook video, Instagram video, or LinkedIn video if you wish.

32. Context groups

Multiply your content by using context groups. Apply several templates to the same content piece so you have visually different videos which may attract a new portion of viewers and fill your content calendar faster.

33. Linked contexts

Choose platforms where you want to publish your content and ContentFries will automatically create correctly resized versions for all of those platforms.

34. Intro & outro stitcher

Apply intro, outro, or both to your video. ContentFries will automatically resize them if needed, and add padding with a color of your choice.

35. Frame saver

Save any video frame as an image which you can use as a quick thumbnail or share it on social media.

36. Video preview improvements

Increase the video playback speed - useful for faster captions proofreading, or if you want to preview your video before exporting.

37. Automatic encoding

If your video is not supported by a browser or is too traffic-heavy, ContentFries will automatically encode it, so it plays smoothly even on slower connections.

38. Uploading wizards

Pause the upload, choose a template, or finish the uploading wizard automatically after the video is uploaded.

39. Rendering system

We recreated the rendering system multiple times from the ground up. As a result, we got a 10x faster and very stable rendering mechanism in place, which is very easy to scale up and add more rendering workers if needed.

40. Infrastructure

Most of the performance-heavy tasks are now being handled by professional servers with AMD Epyc processors.

41. Monitoring

We have monitoring in place which automatically sends us an alarm in case anything goes wrong, or in case any of our services or servers has an outage.

Some of these informations are available on status.contentfries.com

42. Support

We added a knowledge base and an in-app chat so you can contact us at any time and our team members will respond to your questions ASAP.

43. Enhanced uploading method

Enhanced uploading method leverages the global CDN network so you upload your video to a server which is geographically nearest to your location.

This makes the upload faster, but you can also use the Google Drive or Dropbox integration to upload your videos very swiftly.

Please make sure you choose the "Enhanced uploading method" in your profile to have this feature active.

44. System defaults

You can choose a language or contexts which will be preselected in the uploading wizard.

45. Magic auto-login link

Send a magic-login link to your colleague to collaborate on your content. The link is valid for 24 hours, so you don't have to share your password.

46. Limits

We increased the limits, so you can upload a video up to 4Gb to the context editor, or up to 20Gb to the trimmer. Useful if you want to chop up a 4k video to shorter pieces, but your PC is unable to do that.

47. Trimmer contexts integration

Select contexts to which you want to multiply your pillar piece of content and immediately see if some of those pieces of content are not too long or too short.

48. Video injections

Automatically apply intro / outro / video CTA to the pieces of content generated with the ContentFries trimmer.

49. Drag & drop video multiplying

Chop out dozens pieces of content out of your webinar / video podcast / interview / review / YouTube video or others by a simple drag and drop.

50. Trimmer Captions migrator

Upload captions to your trimmer content, or clone your already captioned piece of content to trimmer content with a single click. All pieces of content generated with a ContentFries trimmer which have captions in place will use those captions automatically, so you don't have to caption those videos again.

And that's not all! On top of other features not mentioned in this list, we worked hard to optimize the app's performance, speed up rendering and improve user experience.

The app is now in a stable state, but what's coming up next is the real deal...

Recipes

If there's one thing that we're most excited about, this is it! You'll be able to choose a recipe by which you will cook your content as you want. You'll just provide ingredient (text, audio, images or video) and ContentFries will turn it into the content you're looking for.

Some of the upcoming recipes are:

Turn text to video (Vidnami alternative) Merge multiple videos together (great for quickly generating coaching videos for clients, etc.) Turn audio to video (audio visualizers, etc). Integrations

Upcoming Zapier and Integromat integrations to help you with automating your content production.

Context editor and trimmer 2.0

Our vision is to minimise the tools needed and provide you with every tool necessary to speed up your content production as much as possible. That's why we want to have all the fundamental video editing features inside of the context editor, and support of trimming videos as it is a text document in the trimmer.

To make things simpler we're also considering merging these two tools into one, while keeping it simple and powerful.

Better organization and collaboration

Many agencies use ContentFries as a go-to tool for creating content for their clients. With this update we will support teams and provide you with better collaboration features.

Mobile devices support

Unfortunatelly ContentFries doesn't play nicely with mobile devices. This is something we need to fix, and we also plan to create a light mobile version of the ContentFries app, which will simplify the workflow of video uploads, and others.

Wrapping things up

ContentFries is a content multiplying app designed to make content repurposing as easy and seamless as possible.

In the last year, we have made significant improvements in features such as video injection’s for intro/outro videos or captions migrator which lets you clone a piece of content with captions automatically and use those same captions on any content generated with a ContentFries trimmer just to name a few.

We have also streamlined the app by improving performance and speeding up rendering time significantly.

In addition to these new features that will help your content marketing strategy, we're are excited about upcoming integrations like Zapier and Integromat which will automate even more processes so you can spend less time working on tedious tasks.

Even though we made a huge progress last year, there is and always will be so much to do. Just recipes alone can be an ever-growing library of workflows which you'll be able to use in a few clicks to turn your content into anything your heart desires.

If you like the direction we're heading and think ContentFries can help other people you know, feel free to let them know about it, we will be very glad to see them on board!

In case you're missing a critical feature that may help you and others, share it in the comments section below. We're always listening to our community and try to guide our development as our users wants it, so it would be beneficial for both parties.

What do you think? Do these updates from ContentFries sound like they will help you and your content marketing strategy? Share in the comments below.

PS: We're pleased to announce that we're celebrating our one-year anniversary! Get a ContentFries Lifetime or save up to 50% on annual plans in this limited-time offer.