Animoto videos – music videos for your images, video clips and pictures. With high production value motion graphics synchronized to every beat of your music, Animoto videos blow the doors off traditional slideshows; it is time to move past the slideshow and embrace Animoto -free, easy, beautiful.
I first played with Animoto free version. I thoroughly enjoyed the outcomes of the creations. Initially, I used their extensive library of images, video, and music, to create short 30-second clips for specific uses. Knowing how much effort is required to learn the software, and custom tweak each image, transition, and effect, I could really appreciate the incredible result given the ease of use.
Here is one result, auto-pushed from my Animoto! account and published directly to YouTube, no fuss, no muss.
The upgrade plan, of $250 per year, is worth the investment for the result. Their online support, and email support has been fairly good. They show care and concern, but do have some difficulty responding timely, which often happens with new start-ups. Pressed for time and resources, managing growth, my vote is in for Animoto! They’re doing a great job and offer a great product / service.
Regarding video / image quality. It does matter, the dimensions for images chosen to use. Optimizing images to about 1MB at 1024 x 768 px is the optimal for video processing with Animoto! Applying animation, this will have some impact on video quality, although I’ve been pleased with the results. As I experimented, I accessed my Flickr account through Animoto’s service, and was able to choose images directly to be imported into a project. What lacked here, was being able to see what the Flickr file specs were, and I have some rather smaller resolution versions of many images there.
Tackling a completely different project, which you can view on this blog, hi-resolution images were used, originally 3.5MB each, and well over the recommended 1024 x 768 size. Uploading these to Flickr into a private, hidden folder, I was able to auto-import the best resolution from Flickr directly into the Animoto! project file. Regrettably, you may not be guaranteed the ordering sequence you’d like for those longer projects where it really matters. I found no matter what, I had to manually adjust a few items all the way through the project when a specific sequence was desired.
Animoto! Also allows your own music to be uploaded, so from an artistic point of view, not only can visual artists display their artwork, and musicians show off their music creating their own videos, there could also be many opportunities to team-up to cross-promote to wider audiences.
There are so many fun options with Animoto! This includes the video clip imports too – it’s not just for photos! You’ll just have to go see what I mean. I had so much fun! And still do. 🙂
As with any software, this does take some experimentation to find the sort of results desired for each project. I’ve learned some tips and tricks, and if you touch base, let’s see what conversation brings up in the way of discussion from others who also experiment with Animoto!
Animoto! your photos!
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