Monday, March 17, 2008
Re-Mix Your Photos with Animoto: This Thing ROCKS!
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 07:00 AM
Animoto is easily the most sophisticated, yet easy to use, online slideshow tool I've yet seen. I took it for a spin over the weekend, and if you like the idea of feeding your photos to a service and having it crank out an insanely cool looking music video, then this is the service for you.
The process is really simple - you upload your photos through a Flash-based uploader (which I didn't think was actually possible), and once those are uploaded you move on to the music step. You can either upload a music file off your own computer (and they encourage you to respect the copyright of artists), or you can pick from amongst their surprisingly nice selection of music. In the final stage, where it explains what step of the process it's on, and - this is great - they offer you video trailers and movie news in a sidebar that you can click on while you wait. That put a smile on my face because it's such a nice touch. Here's how my video turned out...
The quality of the video production is stunning - it makes muvee look like Windows Movie Maker, and I generally think quite highly of muvee. Animoto's back-end engine is amazing, especially with matching up motions to beats in the music. Notice at the end of the video it puts up the title of the video, who created it, and the name of the MP3 file I uploaded - both the name of the song and the artist. I didn't enter that information, so it must have pulled that from the metadata. Slick! Equally slick is that you can download an MPEG4 version of your video for offline viewing. That's a nice touch that really rounds out their offering.
I think I'm going to sign up for this one - $3 per video for that one big vacation video, or $30 for the year if you're going to use it a lot, is pretty reasonable in terms of cost. The one sticking point I have is the output resolution: 432 x 240 pixels is pretty low res, even for the browser. Their help file mentions something about a higher resolution offering being worked on, but there's no details about what resolution and bit rate will be offered. If they can offer 800 x 400 or something similar, that would be great.
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog.
The process is really simple - you upload your photos through a Flash-based uploader (which I didn't think was actually possible), and once those are uploaded you move on to the music step. You can either upload a music file off your own computer (and they encourage you to respect the copyright of artists), or you can pick from amongst their surprisingly nice selection of music. In the final stage, where it explains what step of the process it's on, and - this is great - they offer you video trailers and movie news in a sidebar that you can click on while you wait. That put a smile on my face because it's such a nice touch. Here's how my video turned out...
The quality of the video production is stunning - it makes muvee look like Windows Movie Maker, and I generally think quite highly of muvee. Animoto's back-end engine is amazing, especially with matching up motions to beats in the music. Notice at the end of the video it puts up the title of the video, who created it, and the name of the MP3 file I uploaded - both the name of the song and the artist. I didn't enter that information, so it must have pulled that from the metadata. Slick! Equally slick is that you can download an MPEG4 version of your video for offline viewing. That's a nice touch that really rounds out their offering.
I think I'm going to sign up for this one - $3 per video for that one big vacation video, or $30 for the year if you're going to use it a lot, is pretty reasonable in terms of cost. The one sticking point I have is the output resolution: 432 x 240 pixels is pretty low res, even for the browser. Their help file mentions something about a higher resolution offering being worked on, but there's no details about what resolution and bit rate will be offered. If they can offer 800 x 400 or something similar, that would be great.
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog.
