Animoto Mojo

Now here's an online service to get excited about. It's called Animoto and it creates MTV-style movies out of your photographs, music, and video clips. Writes EMorton, G4TV:

"It's like tossing a bunch of steel, glass and leather into a box, shaking it up and then opening the box to find a brand new Ferrari."

I agree. It's beautiful, well-designed, and exceptionally user-friendly. And your finished video can be posted all over the Net -- on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, Blogger, and gobs of other websites that support embedded videos.

The only downside I've discovered is that Animoto, which is still in beta, has a few bugs -- the biggest being that it doesn't always render your Oscar winning slideshow in a timely fashion. Sometimes, in fact, it doesn't complete your product at all. But judging by how professionally Animoto has been put together, how quickly their support team responded to my emails, and how well it works when it does work, I expect this bug to be ironed out quickly.

Here's an example I created to showcase my wedding photography:



The cost: $3.00 per video, or $30.00 a year for unlimited videos. Here's how the folks behind Animoto describe themselves:

"Animoto Productions is a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out.

"Their first release is Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

"The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film.

"Based in New York City with an office in San Francisco, the founders of Animoto include veterans of the entertainment industry and have produced shows for MTV, Comedy Central, & ABC, studied music in London, and played in indie rock bands in Seattle. They continue to innovate in the field of creative artificial intelligence. They plan to acquire Google next year."