Morgan Lewis shares how she uses VEED to effortlessly edit her cooking show Morgan Creates: Beyond the Plate and create content for social media.
Bootstrapping the production of a cooking show when you’re a small team is tough. You need to get creative, and find efficient and budget-friendly ways to handle post-production, while ensuring it looks decent and professional.
Morgan Lewis — founder of Morgan Creates, a food and lifestyle brand — struggled with the same challenge when launching her show.
Read her story, as she shares how she used VEED to generate subtitles for her Amazon Prime cooking show, Morgan Creates: Beyond the Plate, before diving into how the editor has now become an integral part of her post-production process.
Jump to a specific section:
- About Morgan and Her Cooking Show
- Morgan’s Biggest Video Challenge Before VEED
- Other VEED Use Cases
- Key Results Achieved with VEED
- Why Morgan Recommends VEED
Please Tell Us a Bit About Yourself and Your Amazon Prime Cooking Show
I’m the owner and founder of a food and lifestyle brand called Morgan Creates. I started my journey in 2019 after self-publishing a cookbook and launching my business. I eventually started to expand into the lifestyle niche, selling things like candles and self-care products. We also started doing a lot of cooking tutorials; sharing recipes, tips, and tricks that people can use to enhance their lives.
In 2020, the pandemic really pushed my business because a lot of people were starting to cook at home. People lost access to their favorite restaurants, and even had to scale down their lifestyle as many of them also got laid off. I wanted to make the cooking process more approachable, and less intimidating, where people could simply use the ingredients that they had. That’s how we started and continued to propel forward as a food brand.
I then had the idea to start a cooking show. I thought about affordability and accessibility. That’s how Morgan Creates: Beyond the Plate was started.
It’s a show where two home cooks use only the ingredients that they have, which are affordable and accessible, and they are challenged to cook a meal in 15 minutes. That’s the essence of the show: to demonstrate that you don’t need experience working at a 5-star restaurant, use expensive ingredients, or dedicate hours to cook something delicious.
What Were Your Biggest Challenges When it Came to Editing Your Episodes? How Did VEED Help?
When I got the episode files, the hardest challenge was not having the subtitle files that I could upload to Amazon Prime. My producer tried to make these subtitles, but he didn’t have the bandwidth to do so. I then went on Fiverr and even paid someone to do it, but they took weeks before eventually turning around and saying they wouldn’t be able to finish the job.
I had already communicated to people that the show was going to be launching. I was stressed out because I couldn’t even finish uploading it on Amazon since I didn’t have the subtitles.
I then did a Google search and discovered VEED. I had never used it before, so I did some research and liked what I saw.
“When I subscribed to it (VEED), I realized how user-friendly it was. That was the most attractive thing to me. The interface was easy.”
Morgan Lewis, Founder, Morgan Creates
I was able to upload my episodes and generate the subtitles with ease. The subtitles were almost 90% accurate; there were only a couple of instances where I had to go in and maybe correct the way somebody’s name was spelled out.
Besides Generating Subtitles for the Episodes, Is There Anything Else You Use VEED for?
Editing Teaser Clips for the Show
I also started to use VEED to create teaser clips for my show. I have a Mac, so I was used to iMovie, but it just didn’t have a lot of features that to me were modernized. VEED, on the other hand, was far easier to use (and offered all the features I needed to create these teaser clips).
Making Recipes and Tutorials for Social Media
I upload recipes and tutorials on my social accounts, including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Instead of making the reels on the Instagram app, I do them now with VEED. After recording the recipes and tutorial videos through my phone, I upload them to VEED.
Some of the reels I created received 1.4k+ plays, all organically.
“I also like that VEED has an audio library embedded inside it. If you don’t have access to other websites that give you instrumentals, you can get it from VEED. It’s kind of like a one-stop shop.”
Morgan Lewis, Founder, Morgan Creates
Creating Social Ads
I’ve also created a couple of ads with VEED which performed well on Facebook and Instagram. I’ve gone through the process of paying someone to do my social media advertising. But with VEED, it’s easier and faster than me having to wait on someone else to do it.
A 10-second long video ad that I created with VEED received the following results in 6 days:
- 3,586 plays from a 10 sec clip
- 20 saves
- 17 comments
- 156 likes
- 23 shares
For context, my page was desolate without any content. I started to boost the content with video clips to get people’s attention. For an inactive page, I think it did pretty well.
What Key Results Were You Able to Receive with VEED?
I was being charged $200 per episode for the subtitles of a single 15-minute episode.
💸 Cost Saved 💸 Outsourcing the subtitles would have cost Morgan $800 for the 4 episodes of season 1. With VEED’s Pro plan, she was able to save about $770 on subtitling costs.
We are currently working on doing the second season, and my producer said that the post-production is going to be more expensive (about $1,000 per episode). I’m going to save more money because some of the things he’d charge me for, I can just do on my own.
“It (VEED) saved me a lot of money. I just wasn’t able to get anybody especially for the price I paid. The subscription was well worth it. Because I was able to edit some things that were already produced in the final files.”
Morgan Lewis, Founder Morgan Creates
Besides saving me money, VEED turned a two-week job of subtitling into an hour at most. It really cuts down on time.
It has been really helpful on my journey. It saved me a lot of time and a lot of money. Because this is a small production, and is bootstrapped, it can get very expensive, especially with editing and post-production. I’m always willing to be self-sufficient as much as I can to help me save money, so I can continue to do what I am doing. That’s where VEED helped me.
Would You Recommend VEED to Someone?
“I would absolutely recommend VEED to a friend, or anybody who is a creator and doesn’t have an unlimited budget. It’s very user-friendly and the interface is so simple. I feel like a child can probably figure it out. That’s how simple it is.”
Morgan Lewis, Founder Morgan Creates
You get everything on the same platform. You don’t have to toggle from page to page. And the exporting process is also very easy and flexible; you get the option of importing your video in MP3, MP4, or GIF, and I think that is very cutting-edge and important in the age of digital media.
For the price that I pay, I feel like I get more than my money’s worth. VEED saved me when I was in a bind from a time-perspective, trying to figure out how to do subtitles. I’m so glad I was able to find it.
