Animoto.com – generate videos from photos and music

Sometimes you find a topic, sometimes topic finds you. Gravatar blog (I am subscribed to for some reason) had mentioned Animoto today and awesome plus automagically are words that generally catch my attention.

I checked it out – quite cool service that makes videos from your photos and chosen music. Yes, automagically indeed.

What it does

Site is online service that creates video mashups from your input. It takes in (after required registration):

• pictures (uploaded, selected from library or fetched from photo hosting site);
• video clips (uploaded and cropped to 5s);
• music (selected from library or uploaded).

And generates video clip in one of styles (controls background and transitions) from all of that.

Naturally there are some very polished examples of what it can do. Bu what you get with few crappy digital photos and lack of music awareness (exactly what I had)? Something like this:

Strong features

It is kinda cool and you get results with minimum effort. They may not be perfect, but they are awesome for that few clicks.

Clip can be viewed online, shared, embedded and exported to YouTube.

Downsides

Editor is falling apart at times. Buttons stuck and I had a lot of trouble changing sequence of pictures – they jumped around and disappeared.

It warns that if you put in too many pictures some may be dropped. I expected those to be last in sequence, but actually it dropped one in the middle when I tested.

Free version limitations

Processing and hosting online video is crazy resource intensive and expensive. For free you get unlimited amount of branded, non-downloadable, low-res videos, limited to 30s duration.

Paid account buys you a lot of extras and varies from small per-video fee to professional annual accounts.

Overall

There probably isn’t much what you can fit in free 30 seconds. Still some people can pull off amazing things with a picture… Give them 30s and that is a lot of possible awesomeness.

Lack of control over process is main feature and main limitation. Try and decide for yourself about that.

Link http://animoto.com/