Animoto: Turn your photos into a movie (and not in the usual slideshow)

Thanks to an alert by Fred simapticissimo I discovered this service, free for video up to 30 seconds.

Animoto makes it very easy to create real movies starting from your photos (with the possibility to add music). And when I talk about movies I do not mean the usual slideshow that you see everywhere now (and let's face it `.. not only that others are everything I'm much, I find myself always looking for the button to go to the next photo manually).

Already from the demo movies that are on the home page you can see that we are far, far away a lot from classid slideshow. It is however, is difficult to explain in words what kind of result you can get.

So I decided to try it for you, describing the various phases and showing the end result.

After registering you can directly start creating your first video: you can choose the version "short" (30 seconds) or the free Standard version, for a fee. For this test I obviously took the free version.

The site then asks you to choose the photos you want to put: you can either upload directly or you can import photos from various online services like Flickr or Picasa.

Once you've selected all the photos you order (the order will be used as `incipit for the movie), straighten and highlight those" important ". This definition of "important" is the engine that will help the film to set the proper intervals.

The third step lets you choose the soundtrack: here you can put an mp3 you sent on the server (for example, fishing from your collection of music taken from Jamendo CC), or choose a song from the library already present on the site: the library and is divided by genre and you can hear the song before you select it.

Choosing the music is the time to insert some meta tags: title, description and a cover (you can use directly one of the photos submitted).

It is time to move to the "production".

The last stage (the one that takes more time) is completely automatic: It is the stage of rendering. After a few minutes you will have the results ready-made in a flash player:

Once created the video there are all the "usual" options for sharing, including a very useful option download! But if you just want to show it to friends or put it on your blog nothing more simple: Animoto gives you the embedding code directly or you can send your account YouTube.Ecco embedded in the first experiment:

Everything (in my test) is lasted less than 5 minutes, and the result quite satisfactory. But if you are not satisfied just choose "remix" and you are offered two possibilities: leave all settings intact and simply give it all to feed the rendering engine to see what comes out (the film is the same photo but will ` `will be different in layout), or redo the entire procedure, changing the order of photos, highlighting other or changing the soundtrack. Here's the result after a second iteration:

There `what to say, simple interface, functional process extremely quick and simple to configure, amazing result in terms of quality. Only flaw .. the 30 seconds that are slightly Pochini also for use as my amateur (3 minutes made him a star of the network).
ADD: I am after I realized that some of the photos I had were not included in the movie: I added 12 pictures maybe too much for 30 seconds? Strange, but that `there is a report of any tipo.Ovviamente if you choose the paid version the results become more" visible ":

I recommend you try it, it takes a few minutes and divertirete.E if you want to do something more intriguing, I suggest the contest launched on heardontv.com to earn an iTunes Gift Card by the end of September!