Privacy of the Mind

Lisa posted a clip from Animoto on her blog a while back, I’ve been playing with it a bit and finally went ahead and paid for a 1-year subscription. It’s a neat way to set your photos to music without doing a lot of work.

You upload your photos to their site, or import them from one of several other sites that you might have hosted your photos on. In my case, they support Flickr so I was able to simply have Animoto pull over photos from collections that already existed. After gathering up your photos, you can arrange them in the order you want and indicate if you want any of the photos “spotlighted” in your video.

Once that’s done, you either pick a song from their library of tunes or upload an MP3 of your own. Then Animoto goes off and puts together your video. It analyzes the song you uploaded to determine the beat and times the video and transitions to that. You don’t have any direct control over which transitions are used, but you can click the “remix” button to have it generate another copy of the video until you get something you like.

Currently, videos are only hosted online but they promise that in the future you’ll be able to download them to your computer and do other things with them. You can embed them in your blog or other social networks like Facebook and MySpace already.

It’s free to play around with and generate small 30 second videos. To generate longer videos you either buy credits to pay for each video or do what I did, sign up for a one year subscription that grants you unlimited videos. I think it will be interesting to see how this service evolves, though I doubt it will replace other video tools I’m already using.