I signed up with Animoto and made a couple of videos to promote my business last night. There are a lot of things to like abuot Animoto. It’s easy to use, and nearly completely automatic. You just upload your photos, choose the music, and write in a title and description. You can also choose to create a button that shows up at the end of embedded video to point users to a specific website. There’s a decent selection of music of various genres too. The music is available for use royalty-free, which makes things quite easy. After you’ve made your movie, you can download it in DVD quality. Sweet.

The things I don’t like are that it takes a long time to render a movie (about 15-30 minutes, typically). You also don’t get much choice in which transitions and effects are used to display your photos. It is all automatic, so you kind of get what they give you. If you are not satisfied, you can “remix” the video and it will run through the process again, coming out slightly differently, but that takes another 15-30 minutes.

Anyway, here are my first two movies… more to come later.