Animoto

I quite like photographic slideshows done as videos and I've dabbled with them from time to time. However, I've never published any because, ideally, they work best with some music to back them up and as far as I'm concerned that can create all sorts of copyright issues.

This morning I read this RedBubble journal entry by Grant Bissett and decided to create an Animoto account and have a quick play. The thing that most attracted me was the fact that they appear to have a library of licensed music, thus solving the copyright issue I tend to worry about.

It's pretty clever too. You start a video project, you either upload a bunch of images, or download them from a small selection of supported image-hosting sites (in my case from Flickr), you make the final selection, you select the backing music, and then wait a (very) short while. And then you've got a video.

There are options for sharing and embedding the video, and there's also the option to upload to YouTube:

There are two levels to the service. You can create videos for free but they can't be any longer than 30 seconds. If 30 seconds isn't enough you can make a longer video on a pay-per-video basis. There's also the option (which you also have to pay for) to create DVD quality videos. All seems fair and sensible to me.

Besides, these days, who's got an attention span longer than 30 seconds? ;-)