From Sampler to Sower

So, you’re fresh back from your youth retreat with a digital camera full of stunning photos and you want to know the best way to show your church all the great things that happened while you were away, but you don’t have the time to spend all day editing a video together.  What do you do?

If you’ve been reading this site recently, you know what I’d do.

Head to Animoto.com.

Animoto is a web-based service that takes your photos and video clips and edits them into a montage, complete with a tightly synced soundtrack.  It is, quite honestly, amazing what this software can do.

First, sign up for an account.  With a free account you can make as many free 30-second clips as you would like.  Want a longer video?  That’s easy.  For $3 you can buy an upgrade credit and make a full-length video.  Even better, in my opinion, is to upgrade to an all-access pass for $30 and for a whole year you can make as many videos as you want.  (As easy as Animoto is, you’ll make a lot.)

Or you can even go to the next step up, and for $249 you can not only make as many videos as you want for a year, you can make as many Hi-Res videos as you want.  (Hi-Res upgrade credits for all-access pass holders is $5 per video and with one you can download a hi-res mp4 video as well as .iso files for easy burning to DVD.)  What’s more, with the $249 professional account you can make videos for commercial use, access a wider range of soundtracks licensed for commercial use, add buttons to your video that drive viewers to your website and strip the Animoto logo from the end of your video so the focus is on you and your organization rather than on Animoto.

Once you have your account, making your first video is just three easy steps. 

First, upload your photos. You can either upload them directly to Animoto, or retrieve them from your own Flickr, Facebook or Picasa account.  (Since I use Flickr I know you can even retrieve the photos by photoset, so creating a video from a specific event is fast and easy.)  Or, if you want a montage of video clips you can upload them directly to Animoto (there are currently no retrieval services available for videos.)  Then you can adjust the order of the elements and even add some text.

Once you’ve chosen your photos, you pick your soundtrack.  The program will tell you how long your final video will probably be and you can search Animoto’s collection of soundtracks for tracks of similar length.  (The even have a nice collection of music from Christian artists.)  Don’t like what they offer? Upload your own audio (keeping in mind to respect copyrights as you do so).  Is the track too long? Don’t worry; Animoto will let you set start and stop points, or, if you prefer, trim the audio automatically to match your video length.

Finally, give your video a title and optional description (which appears on the Animoto site), and your video’s ready to render.

When it’s done rendering the video, Animoto will notify you by email with a link to your final video.  From there, if you don’t like it, you can remix it or fine tune it.  Or if you do like it, you can use the video toolbox to share it with your friends by sending it as a video email, embedding it into your website, or exporting it directly to YouTube.  The YouTube export can take a while to complete, but once you set it to export, you don’t need to babysit the process and in the end, you expose your video to the world’s second most used search engine.

As is so often the case here, I’ve received nothing from Animoto in exchange for this review.  It’s just a great web service that has made my life easier and created some great quality content.  Go ahead, try it out. It’s free.