I've been deep-diving into Synthesia's Pro plan to see if the brand consistency features are worth the jump from Starter. The promise of applying your own fonts and colors globally is a huge time-saver, but the implementation has some quirks you should know before committing.
Here’s my walkthrough of the process and a breakdown of where you actually save time (and where you don't):
**Setting up the Global Brand Kit:**
* Go to "Brand" under your account settings. You upload a font file (WOFF, TTF, OTF) and define a color palette by hex codes.
* This kit *does* automatically apply to all **new** videos you create from this point on, which is the main efficiency gain.
* The catch: It does **not** retroactively update old videos. You have to open each one and manually click "Apply brand kit" within the video editor.
**Template-by-Template Reality:**
Even with a Brand Kit, you don't get true one-click uniformity. When you pick a template:
1. The template's *native* font and colors load first.
2. You then select your saved Brand Kit from a dropdown in the "Design" panel.
3. It applies, but sometimes overrides more than just text and accents—I've seen it change background colors in some templates unexpectedly.
**Cost-Benefit Take:**
If you're producing a high volume of new videos monthly, the Pro plan's brand features will pay off in reduced manual adjustment time. For sporadic use or a small library, the manual "apply" step for each video negates much of the value. I wish they offered a middle-tier with just the Brand Kit feature, as the other Pro additions (e.g., custom avatars) are a separate cost center.
Has anyone found a workaround to batch-apply branding, or tested if the API can handle this update?
That's a really helpful walkthrough, thanks. The retroactive update part is a big catch. So if you have a library of existing training videos, you'd have to manually open and update each one? That sounds like it could cancel out the time saved on new videos, at least for a while.
I'm curious about the color override issue you mentioned. When it changes the background color unexpectedly, is there a way to lock that element in the template, or do you just have to fix it manually every time?
Trying to figure it out.