Animoto is a terrific service that creates video presentations combining photos and music with some great visual effects and very little effort on your part. The beauty of Animoto is that it works with the photos you probably have already uploaded. Animoto can retrieve your photos from Flickr, facebook, smugmug, Picasa or photobucket. You select the photos you want to use, including any special photos you would like to highlight in the video.
For music, you can upload your own or choose from a very nice selection in a variety of genres. For the video above, I chose one of the Indie Rock selections.
That’s about it! Animoto then creates your video automatically. When it’s done, you’ll have a code you can use to embed it on your own blog, or Animoto will automatically embed your video on facebook, myspace, blogger and several other sites. You can even automatically upload the video to YouTube, or download a Quicktime version to your computer.
All of this is free… as long as you’re happy to limit your videos to 30 seconds in length. Longer videos can be created at a cost of $3 each, or you can pay $30 for an annual subscription that let’s you create an unlimited number of “full-length” videos.
The results speak for themself. I was pleased, given the amount of effort that went into it (almost zero). Check out Animoto.
In More than fine I share the stuff I think is worth sharing. I cover Web 2.0 developments, online communities, and knowledge management -- with a heathy dose of randomness to keep you on your toes. 
March 16th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Hi
I wish I knew the secret ingredient in uploading a photo as you have done. I tried on several occasions to upload sized images without anything even close to success.
It looks very nice, but I will have to try again another day. I did send them my feedback to let them know that on my very fast connection and a selection of small sized images (and lastly even trying just one) didn’t work for me, even on their recommended browser, Firefox.
Looks cute though, and hope that the site was having an off day, perhaps due to the weekend, a new launch, and lots of activity.
March 17th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Xerraire, I did not upload images, but instead connected Animoto to my Flickr account and used a set from there. It did the rest automatically.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Well I thought I better get back here and tell you that I managed to finally upload images and music.
The culprit was that I didn’t have the absolute latest version of Flash. I thought I had it with 9.0, but there was in fact, a few more numbers after that for the latest version.
Now all is well with the site for me: http://animoto.com/play/VU11zvUKnhiXhC2mFMxErg
(Laura and friends)
By the way, the reason I was able to figure out the problem was a quick reply from the staff at Animoto.