A few days ago, I stumbled across a video on YouTube that was an amazing photo slide show. ANIMOTO is a service that allows you to upload your own photos, add some music, and it will “analyze” the music to create a photo video that moves to the music. Take a look at the video I created in a few minutes with some pictures of mine and friend’s pets.
The above video only took me around 5 minutes to upload the pictures, pick out the music, and then it took ANIMOTO about another 5 to render the photos and music into a flash video. ANIMOTO has a library of music that users can choose from or upload their own music (it must be “legit” though, not copyrighted)
ANIMOTO allows users to create a 30 second video with photos and custom music at no charge. To create a longer video, users are required to buy “credits” (currently $3 each) or all-you-can make for $30/year.
The service is a snappy flash interface that uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to render the videos. The service is easy to figure out how to use and definitely seems like something that I can see becoming popular with teens to embed on MySpace, Facebook, etc. As a matter of fact, the service already has the ability to help you put the videos on YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Blogger just to name a few.
I could see problems with copyrighted music being uploaded and that becoming an obstacle for ANIMOTO in the near future. Hopefully users will stay honest and not upload music they don’t have the copyright to.
Give them a shot today!
Where have you been, @joshm??