Animoto: Transform 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 truth .. is not that all I'm much, I find myself always looking for the button to manually switch to the next photo).

Already 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 stages 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 version of the standard fee. For this test I've obviously got the free version.

The site then asks you to choose the photos you want to make: 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 build the film correctly set intervals.

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

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

It is time to move to "production".

The last phase (the one that takes more time) is fully automatic: it's the rendering phase. After a few minutes you will result in a ready-made flash player:

Once made the video there are all the "usual" options to share, including a useful option downloads! But if you just want to show it to friends or put it on your blog nothing more easy 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 five minutes, and the result very 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 `will the same picture but `layout will be different) or redo the entire procedure, changing the order of photos, highlighting or other changing soundtrack. Here is the result after a second iteration:

There is not to say, simple interface, functional process extremely quick and easy to configure, amazing result from the qualitative point of view. Only flaw .. 30 seconds are a little bit for a amateur like me (3 minutes would make a star 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 many for 30 seconds? Strange however is that there is an alert 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 you divertirete.E if you want to do something more intriguing, I suggest the contest launched on heardontv.com to win an iTunes Gift Card by the end of September !