Earlier this year, the award winning online video creation service, Animoto, launched its enhanced version of its service for photographers. It updated its system to include a new rendering engine that allowed for the creation of 720p HD videos and 10x faster rendering. It had also redesigned its website for much smoother video creation and distribution.
The render engine moved from CPU (central processing unit) to GPU (graphics processing unit) which now employs the same type of graphics processing capablilities that is used in motion pictures and gaming. With the focus on photography taking off last year with the introduction of eight new video styles, this year has continued to add to that expansion.
At its heart, Animoto is a video slideshow creation service that allows photographers, businesses, and consumers to make professional quality videos from their photos and video clips. At the base, is the Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that is programmed to think and act like a director and editor using many of the same skills that are used in television and film production.
How Does Animoto Work?
Animoto is actually pretty simple to work with. There are four different account types – Lite, Plus, Pro, and Reseller. I am working with the Pro account which gives you everything for both personal as well business promotion. For more information on what features each type of account contains, check out the Animoto Plans and Pricing page.
Once you are all signed up, you choose the files that you want to use to create your video. In my case, I had just returned from the American Eventing Championships (an equestrian national championship) near Atlanta Georgia where I was the photographer for a participating barn during the 4 day event. I took about 2000 shots during the time period and wanted to put together short videos covering the event for the barn. The one at the end of this review this was the second day of the event.
I went through my photos for that day and selected around 50 shots that I wanted to use. I processed them as I normally would and then I then exported them out as .JPG files with the long edge at 1280 since this is the recommended length for 720p resolution and I wanted the final to be playable on my Blu-ray player and HD TV.
Article comments
1 - Yvonne Henderson
This is a really good summary of Animoto; I am planning on subscribing to make some videos to promote my products on my web-site. I was wondering if Animoto would do the job; seems just what I need. Thank you for an informative summary.