Animoto
July 8, 2008 – 12:32 pm by Nick BodmerHere is a cool new use for all those pictures we all have on our various social networking sites.
Animoto.com is a web application that creates MTV-style videos with the click of a button.
Users simply choose a song and images. Animoto then automatically generates a unique video for them. No two videos are ever the same.
Many of the post-production techniques that the founders used while working as producers for MTV, Comedy Central & ABC are used in Animoto’s patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence developed to think like an actual editor and director. The resulting video is produced in a widescreen format, containing the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.
I’ve tried out Animoto, and have come away very impressed. The quality of the videos that are produced is extremely high, and creation could not be easier. The site also integrates tightly with Facebook, Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa and Smugmug, allowing images to be imported very easily.
Animoto is free for video “shorts” (under 30 seconds), and has the ability to send to friends, embed in website, and upload to YouTube. However they do charge for longer videos or for the ability to download to your computer. They even have a “dvd” option where they will create a dvd quality image that you can download and burn.
Here is a quick video I put together from my iPhone in about 2 minutes. It pulled the pictures directly from an album on my Facebook page.
