Introducing Animoto

I read about a site called Animoto.com and gave it a try. If a picture is worth a thousand words, probably the best way to tell you what the site is all about is to show you:



After creating an account (which takes less than a minute), you can create your first video:

1. Upload pictures from your computer or other source (such as flickr). You must have at least 10 pictures.
2. Select the music. Animoto lets you choose the genre and choose from a list of music within that genre.
3. You upload the video.

It takes a little while for the site to put your video together, and you know what they say about a watched pot. So, go and do something else and before you know it, you will have an e-mail telling you it's ready and giving you a link to your video.

The site is free if you are creating short videos (around 30 seconds). To create longer ones costs a fee. You can save your video to your computer. You also have the ability, as we show here, to embed the video in a blog.

The demonstration video I put together, using photos of our dogs, took less than 5 minutes to create. Most of that time involved waiting for the computer to complete the upload of the pictures.

I shared this site with Pattie Thomas, principal at R. L. Young Elementary School, and by the next morning, she had created a video of her own and posted it to her school blog.

If you are looking for a time-saving way to create a short "commercial" presentation, Animoto is a good one.