Animoto auto-creates music videos and evolves the slide show*

I heard of Animoto from a fab, fellow musician with wild hair, Ugress. Since he has really good taste in Internet finds, the kind that you trust almost all the time, I decided to jaunt over and tell my wife about it.

It's pretty straightforward: you signup, load in some pictures — they can be imported from Flickr sets, so if you want to be selective, put only what you want in a set — upload an MP3, and it "thinks" for several minutes and auto-creates a music video. I suspect modern music with strong, regular beats works better, but as you'll see, even a poetic piano piece goes through nicely. During this process, there's not much in the way of controllability, yet the end results look pretty good, motion graphics-wise:

(I wonder if uploading the same stuff twice gives the same results, or if the transitions are randomized to a degree — haven't tried it yet.)

I like the shuddery camera tracking motion and motion blur, which adds to the liveliness. In an age where many web slide show creators are still limited to crossfade dissolves and perhaps a touch of sparkle sprinkles, Animoto has them beat.

You can also export directly to YouTube, which sounds cool, but in the end, painfully exposes how poor YouTube's encoding quality is and needs to be upped to keep pace with the likes of, say, Revver. Compare the 2nd video above to this.

Drawbacks & observations:

• 30-sec. vids are free, but to have a full-length vid, it's US$3/vid. "All-Access Pass", which is essentially an unlimited yearly subscription, is US$30. I don't think that's quite worth the price yet compared to the near-US$25/year for a Flickr or Picnik subscription, and there should be more selective options, like the kinds of transitions you want to include, or even presets for the overall "mood" (Animoto's currently trend towards "dark and dangerous" due to the aforementioned cam FX).
   
• Big boon would be a high-res download mode, so you could put videos in your NLE and process them even further. Raw pieces for greater ease of offline remixage would be another notch over that.
   
• Preview picture should be more engaging than a matte green screen (as seen above), which doesn't adequately communicate the excitement of the experience to follow.
   
• Also, I noticed that the Javascript embed code gets badly mangled in Windows Live Writer, which is highly unusual — most embedded scripts I've used may get expanded in source code view, but work fine.

Long story short, Animoto looks great and is promising. Automation makes it easy for people who'd rather not mess with keyframes to get started. In the meantime, I look forward to continued growth and am going to submit my music.

 
* My original heading for this post was fancier, but didn't say all that much, so I decided to be straightforward.

Tagged as: General, The Web, Video