bobbyblue's blog

Using Animoto, you upload your pictures, choose your music, and using it’s advanced Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology, the program will produce a fully customized composition of your images and music in widescreen format that has the visual appearance and energy of a music video and movie trailer. Here’s the video I created in 8 minutes!

The technology analyzes your photos and music and combines them with the same techniques and skills used in the film and television industries. The service is very cool because it takes into account every aspect of a song including the genre, song structure, rhythm, vocals, instrumentation, and much more. So if you pick an alternative rock song for your video, you can expect that it’ll be fast-moving, shaky, etc.

Another really cool feature is that you can share the videos via email, embed them into your blog or web site, or post them onto your social networking site of choice, such as MySpace and FaceBook. Creating a video takes just a few minutes because all you have to do is choose the images and pick the music, everything else is taken care of by Animoto. Each video is a full 24 frames per second, so you can be assured the quality is good whether you play it on the computer or on a TV. Anyone can create a 30 second video for free as many times as they like. If you want to crate a full-length video (longer than 30 seconds), you can buy credits.

Also, it’s even easier to create a video if you pictures are stored on an online photo management site. Animoto can connect to Picasa, Flickr, FaceBook, Smugmug, and Photobucket to retrieve images! The max size for a photo is 1MB, so if you have high resolution photos, you will need to reduce them in size first.

To get started, click Create Video at the top left and register on the site. Next, choose whether you wan to create a Animoto Short or Full-Length video.

Next, choose whether you want to upload pictures or retrieve from another site as mentioned above. I use Picasa Web Albums, so I chose to grab them from there. Simply grant access to the service and your pictures show up in Animoto. Painless!

Next, go through your images and rotate them, delete them, or spotlight them. Spotlighting a photo means you want to give it more emphasis in the video than others. You can spotlight as many photos as you like. A free video will only require about 15 to 20 images, otherwise it’ll be considered full-length.

Next you need to choose your music. You can either upload from your computer or choose from their online collection. They only have three genres as of now, Indie Rock, Electronica, and Hip Hop. Finally, give your video a title, description, producer name, etc.

Click Create Video to make your personalized music/movie video. It takes about 5 to 10 minutes to create it, so be patient. Luckily, they have a nice progress bar by which you can watch what is happening:

That’s it!