Animoto – Dynamic Video from Images

I tested a cool new beta application called Animoto yesterday that could very well be the end of slideshows as we know them. I always wanted to create something artistic with my images and Animato has provided an easy tool for rendering striking video montages. Users can upload images from their PC or popular hosting sites and select audio from disc or stock offerings. Everything on the Web should be this easy and unique.

Animoto was built with Ruby on Rails to render a unique creation every time the user mixes or remixes a video. The tone of the “videos” is largely dependent on the images and the musical accompaniment. Animoto's patented AI software at analyzes images and audio and processes it as an actual editor or director would. Regardless of what kind of intelligence the service uses the results are striking and fool proof. In my dabbling with Adobe and other complex editors I seldom got better results than Animoto created in 3 or 4 minutes working with images alone.

Main Site

The dead simple UI at Animoto leads the user through the simple steps of selecting download source, organizing the images and selecting music. Images are dragged and dropped into position and users then choose their music source and start point. I should note here that special effects added to individual images appear to be the next aspect upgrade, but highlighting is the only current effect. Users can also rotate, delete, add or upload multiple images at once via hosted or personal libraries.

Sample Library

Pros

Animoto really pushes the “easy button” for making personalized montage creations. So often simple equates into a low quality result, but the developers here have essentially made an Adobe primer for people on the go. As I said, the UI is foolproof and creating, aggregating and organizing images in this way is pure Web 2.0. This initial installment delivers professional quality widescreen format animations with the impact of movies.

Cons

Animoto is a clean, simple and super cool to use tool, but it does need some tweaking. The biggest drawback I could find was the amount of time it took to generate the videos. One has to expect some delay considering what the technology is doing but many will get impatient after 3 or 4 minutes. As I mentioned before, special effects additions and more advanced features are not currently abundant, but it is fairly obvious these are in the works. Aside from these understandable early negatives, paying for the service is the only major hurdle for users. The 30 second short videos are free and unlimited but full length versions are $3 each or $30 per year for unlimited usage. This yearly price seems fair but I just balk at services monetized in this way.

Conclusion

People are going to love this service. With the addition of a few more features Animoto will enable people to finally create dynamic shorts with their massive image libraries. Animoto was created by veterans of the entertainment industry who obviously share a vision of helping people express themselves without spending years doing it. The music lounge supports new artists and their music, which I thought was an insightful addition to such an innovation. Even though I hate to say it, Animoto is a bargain at the yearly subscription price (I never thought I would actually say that). I guess you can tell I like it, the easy part is our readers will too.

My Montage of family and friends