Video Slideshows With Animoto

Researching for a client recently I came across a neat little service called Animoto. The problem we had was needing a photo gallery that lives on a single page. Not a huge problem in itself and any of these would work, or numerous others I’ve worked with or built over the years. But the issue here is the CMS we have to work with doesn’t have the ability to upload media, this has to be done separately via FTP, so it’s a messy process and not ideal to leave in the hands of the account team. So I figured the best option would be to find some third party service that we could embed, the files would live on a remote host and eliminate the need to upload files to our server. So naturally I thought Flash would be a good fit for this and pretty quickly found myself at Animoto.

Dubbed “The end of slideshows” Animoto is a very tidy web application that instantly creates fun little video slideshows of a photo gallery. It is very clean and easy-to-use, comprising of two simple steps – upload images and pick a background song (you can pick from a simple selection of provided songs or upload your own), and a then just wait out a few minutes of rendering time. Within minutes I’d created a neat little video slideshow of my boy, shown above. It’s free to create a short 30 second video (12-15 photos recommended), and $3 to create a full length video or $30 for an unlimited amount for a full year and for $5 per video you can download it DVD quality. There’s also a professional license for $249 per year which gives you everything included at no extra charge as well as allowing a call-to-action button, white labeling the video, free commercially licensed music, and of course all the videos you make are approved for commercial use.

And once you’ve created the video it’s available to post to any social media (using Clearspring) or embed in your blog. And you can create a remix, which can be a one-click automatic process, or you can edit the remix – revolving images, adding text, spotlighting, as well as adding or deleting images. This is the one-click remix I made of the above video:

It wasn’t the ideal product for us to use for this particular project, but I was very impressed with the concept and the execution and it’s something I will be keeping in mind for the future. For personal use I think I could have a lot of fun with it – converting family photo albums, and work party or street barbecue photo mashups, and the fact it comes as an iPhone app and I can instantly create the videos from my photo reel on-the-go, as well I have all the ones I’ve previously created with me at all times, is pretty awesome.