How To Make an Animoto Video

You may have come across Animoto Video production in your travels. I would like to share the process of making an Animoto Video with you and some of the pros and cons.

Trialling it

There are 3 main options for using Animoto Videos. Free, All-Access, and Business – 3 month or full-year. Simply sign up (must be older than 13) and you’re away. I would recommend you trial it first to get a feel for it, unless you want to make some quick commercial video products.

Since I’ve been a member for a couple of weeks (commercial licence), I’ve created 4 videos. Now it doesn’t take long to do and it’s a fairly intuitive process. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results, but there are some limitations, which I’ll get into in a minute.

Video Creation

Creating a video is as simple as uploading photos (quickest if you resize to 1024x768 at around 100k), assigning an order to them, ‘spot-lighting’ various unique photos, inserting some text/headings, uploading an audio/music track and adding a few details about your video. Then it’s as simple as selecting ‘render’ and away it goes working in the background without it taking up any of your valuable CPU power. You are then free to go and make another one, whilst it renders.

Advantages

The advantages for making an Animoto video are:

· really quick to use – depending on length approximately 5 minutes for a 30 sec video to render,

· don’t have to worry about doing the fly-ins/effects, professional looking results, fade-ins/outs automatically done,

· slow down photo tempo or speed it up to suit music,

· broadcast to Twitter and Facebook, export to Utube,

· embed code on your blog/website, send a greeting card, share with your contacts,

· re-editing available should you wish to change anything

Pros

Now the aforementioned cons are a pretty good set of advantages. But if you’re anything like me, you only really get a feel for a program long after the trial has finished. So here are a few things you will probably not like:

· placing the images in order can be finicky – you’ll probably find that when you move one around, it’ll pop back down to another section. This means that when you move a photo around to put it into order and then try to place it, it sometimes has a mind of its own and will drop into another section in your photo arrangement. This can be frustrating; however it’s better if you do your ordering from the bottom up, as a work-around.

· The arrangement of your video fly-ins/effects is done automatically, so you don’t get a creative say over this. After doing four now, there is little variation in this style, and you might become a little bored after doing say 10 of them. Your audience probably will too. This is the advantage of editing suites like Premier and the like, in that you control this process to help your presentations/ productions stay fresh. The best work-around for this is with the photos you upload. For example, you could style 30 photos in some theme or colour and this would enhance the ‘look’ of the video.

· If MP3’s aren’t a problem for you, then uploading your files won’t be an issue...unless you only have another format like wave...then you’ll have to convert it of course. Apart from that, you are limited to a 10 minute sound track and/or 10mb and you are only able to use one song at a time.

· You also can’t use actual video, so you’re restricted to just photos.

Commercial Licence

If you hold a commercial licence, then you can make a professional-looking video on just about any product in record-breaking time. However, if you plan to sell the video to your client, you can only sell it to an individual (eg, a photographer selling a video after a photo-session with a client) and not a business.

As I understand it, Animoto now requires you to have a commercial account for each company you’re creating videos for. They recently updated their TOS - Each business using Animoto commercially must have their own Animoto for Business account - so you will need to factor in $99 for a 3 month account into your pricing for your clients. You won’t be selling the actual video to the business, you are charging for your time and effort in creating a compelling video for them.

So this basically means that if I wish to create a video for say Bob the Plumber, then I’ll have to create an account for this and pay $99 to register his business. I can then create a video and it can be used in whatever way; Bob would own this video.

Hope that helps…have a look at the video I created using Animoto, leave comments if you like.

Cheers

Alan

Check out Animoto here: http://animoto.com/?ref=tgsewzdh