Looks Like Animoto Still Rocks!

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I made a short video on Animoto to see how long it would take

My experiment last week with Xtranormal

Last week I made a short video using the online Xtranormal tool. While it was fun up to a point, I decided it was a tad too beta for me to use right now for any business-related purpose.

Comparing with Animoto

Inevitably, I was comparing it with Animoto, which I first heard about late in 2007 and then posted about here, just over two years ago, with a very basic test video.

The comments on the post last week about the Xtranormal service prompted me to revisit Animoto last night and do yet another quick video, just by grabbing some images from my computer and selecting some music from the clips on offer from the Animoto site.

No Oscar for this production, but what might be of interest to others was how long it took, namely about 30 minutes. But about 20 minutes of that was searching for music – I think there was a *lot* of music there for Valentine’s Day. In the event, I picked something for the sound and ignored the title “A Night in the Park” which was not really spot on for a video featuring daytime beach scenes.

Both my previous experiment in 2008 and this one were done using the 30 second free version. After all this time I am seriously thinking of throwing caution to the winds and taking out a full access for one year subscription for the princely sum of $30.

A few of the things I like about Animoto:

* you can use their music or yours
* uploading images is easy (next I’ll have to try their video upload)
* sharing to YouTube was just a click (also in Xtranormal except it didn’t work there)

I’m thinking of some smart ways I can use Animoto, e.g. to kick off a couple of presentations I’m doing over the next couple of weeks. For that I’ll probably need to make that move sooner rather than later, from cheap (as in, free) to paid.

Why not create your own video slideshow at animoto.com?