Animoto: Making Photo Slideshows a Breeze

Now that my wife and I have our first child, we are taking tons of pictures of him and showing them off to friends and family. But the plain old slideshow just gets a little boring sometimes, and I want to be able to spice them up a bit. I could use iMovie, but I was intrigued by Animoto and the ease of use of their mobile app.

For those of you that don’t know, Animoto started off as a way to create easy slideshows of your pictures through a web based interface. Over time, they grew and got more and more popular and launched an iPhone app which really wasn’t much, but this past Dec, they launched 2.0 and it came with some great improvements.

Creating a Video

The first thing you need to do is create an account with Animoto and then you can start to customize your own slideshow. There are four different tools that you can use to enhance your videos and to make them stand out.

One of the first things you are going to want to do is to choose a style that you will want to use in your slideshow. These styles make up the background of your video and there are five of them you can choose from. You can view a sample of each one and when you find the one that you like, you can select it for your use.

Secondly, no slideshow is complete without a little music in the background. Animoto, unfortunately, doesn’t let you use your music that is on your iPhone as an option; instead, they have a pretty big library of songs to choose from. The downside of this is that as I search the library, albeit a large one, there really aren’t a whole lot of artists and songs that I actually recognize, so it takes me a pretty long time to find a song that I really want to use.

According to Animoto, they say at the moment they don’t have the ability to use the music on our iOS device and that if we wanted to use our own music, we would have to go to the website and upload it there. Once we do that, then we can add it to our video using the web interface.

Next, you are going to want to add your photos to your slideshow by either taking pictures with your iPhone or choosing them from your camera roll. Once you select the ones you want to use, you can rearrange them in the order that you want them to be in, as well as rotate, duplicate and spotlight them.

The last thing you can do is add text by utilizing text boxes in your slideshows, which can have a main heading as well as a subheading that both have character limits of 22 and 30 respectively. The interesting thing that I soon found out as I was selecting pictures and creating text boxes was that I could only have twelve of them total before I got a warning message telling me that I had to upgrade my account if I wanted to add more. This was somewhat of a let down for me, as twelve slides don’t really do a slideshow justice, in my opinion.

Producing Your Video

Once you’re done adding the things that you want to your video, you can then preview your movie to see your final product. Once you are done, you can then produce your movie so that you’re ready to show the world your creation. When it is done rendering, you will get an email saying that your video is ready to be viewed and can share it with your friends and family. Animoto gives you a good variety of share tools with Facebook, Twitter, email and text as options to let others see your videos.

Pricing

As I mentioned to you before, the iPhone app is somewhat limiting unless you are willing to upgrade your account. You really don’t get a whole lot with the free version other than the fact that you can make an unlimited amount of very short videos. If you really want to utilize the power of Animoto you have to be willing to upgrade to their Plus or Pro plans. They start at $5/month or $30/year for the Plus plan and $39/month or $249/year on the Pro plan. For most people that want to use Animoto on a regular basis, then I would say the Plus plan is more than enough.

Final Thoughts

One of the killer features that I really like in Animoto is the fact that it takes your pictures and is able to put them into a really great slideshow for you. There is no hassle to deal with slide transitions because they do it all for you, so it really cuts down on the time required to make a video. That being said, if you really want to take advantage of the application and get the most out of it, you are going to want to pay for it. The free version is just too limiting and is really more of a way for you to sample Animoto to see if you will like it or not.

Overall, I think it is a great app and it is very easy to use on the iPhone. For someone like me who likes to create these slideshows, but doesn’t want to fiddle with all the different aspects of it to get a good looking video, this is a great way to go. I would like to see the ability to use my own music and add video clips, which according to Animoto, they say is coming in a future update. Go and download it from the App Store for free and try it out and see what you think of it.