About two weeks ago, Animoto launched. It’s billed as “the end of slideshows” and they might be right.
Here’s how it works:
- You upload a bunch of your pictures.
- You upload a song or choose one of the songs they provide.
- You tell it to start.
From there, it analyzes your pictures, analyzes the music, and then makes the pictures dance to the music in crazy ways. One review of the site said “It’s like tossing a bunch of steel, glass and leather into a box, shaking it up and then opening the box to find a brand new Ferrari.” That’s completely accurate.
After the video is done, you can get embed code for it and put it on your website (just like YouTube does). They have plans to allow you to download a HQ version of the movie and some other fun stuff, too.
The cost is free for “shorts”, which are videos under 30 seconds. Full length videos (with a cap well over 20 minutes) is $3/video or just $30/year for unlimited. I consider that to be a great deal. The cool part is the “shorts”, where you can try it out, build some videos and see what you really think.
To show off, here’s one that we did:
One other tidbit. Twice now I’ve sent them e-mails — once with a small problem, the other with a few ideas for the future. In both cases, they replied in less than five minutes. This is a company that is just exploding with traffic and users, yet they still respond amazingly quickly. That’ll go a long way.
Give it a shot. You’ll love it.
