Animoto.com is a free web application that automatically generates professionally choreographed 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. The finished video is produced on a widescreen format and has the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.
With Animoto.com, you can create 2 types of photo videos:
Animoto Shorts (Free, but only 30 seconds long)
Full-length videos ($3 each)
Animoto Shorts are 30-seconds long and perfect for 10 to 15 photos depending on the beat of your music. The free Animoto Short is my preference. 30 seconds seem short, but have you noticed how short people's attention span is these days?
Here's an example of an Animoto Short video that I created using photos from a birthday party:
Technorati Tags: [tag-tec]flip-video-camcorder[/tag-tec], [tag-tec]flip-video-editing[/tag-tec] The super-easy flip video camcorder plugs directly into your laptop or PC USB port so you can transfer the video without any fancy cables or firewire ports.
While that makes it very easy to upload your videos on internet to share with your friends and family, you may want to take an extra step and edit it first. Watching unedited raw footage is like watching grass grow.
To turn your flip video clip into an entertaining movie with nifty transitions, special effects, titles and music, you need a video editing software. The movie-editing software that I highly recommend for busy and time-pressed folks like us is Read more
The simplest video editing is when you take out the editing completely. It's rare, but on occassion, you shoot a short snippet that's so perfect you want to share it as is. Like this video of Charlie biting big brother's finger.
This short video about a toothy baby, Charlie, who bites his big brother, has been viewed on YouTube over 12 million times. The video made us chuckle, but if you were Charlie's parents, would you be concerned that the whole world knows about your 2 children by face?
I'll admit that I put my kids, nieces, nephews on YouTube all the time. And I'm not worried. Why? Because, according to Wikipedia, there are over 77 million videos available for viewing on YouTube. I figure the chances that my baby son's music video is going to become another Charlie, or even be viewed by my friends or family, is pretty slim.
There are precaution available to you if you are still concerned about sharing your videos on YouTube. When you first upload your file to YouTube, you will be asked to select from Broadcast Options - Public or Private. By choosing Private you will restrict your video so that it can only be viewed by you and up to 25 other people).
But then your son won't get to be as famous as Charlie…
Almost all my [tag]video editing[/tag] projects involves adding soundtrack. Soundtrack does a lot to engage the viewer emotionally. After years of making movies for friends and family, I found that I was reusing the same soundtrack a little too often. How to tell? When even your friends and family notice. But it’s not easy to find new soundtrack that is free and that I can use legally.
I was very happy therefore to discover www.SpliceMusic.com. Every sound on Splice is automatically covered with the creative commons attribution license. What this means is that as long as you give credit back to where you found it on SpliceMusic, you can legally use it for your [tag-tec]video editing[/tag-tec] projects for free. All you have to do is give credit where credit is due and you are in the clear.
Once you find the free soundtrack you want, you can download it as an MP3 file. You can then use a [tag-tec]video editing software[/tag-tec] to add the MP3 file to your movie projects. If video editing is new to you, an excellent [tag]free video editing software[/tag] we recommend is Windows Movie Maker by Microsoft.
But SpliceMusic is more than a collection of free soundtracks. It’s a free online sound mixer as well. You can start with a soundtrack, trim it, repeat it into a rhythmic pattern, add more soundtracks and compose a unique sound effect for your home movies.
This video below demos this fun process of finding and mixing soundtracks.
Adobe's Remix is a new Web-based [tag]video editing[/tag] tool that will be provided free to all Photobucket members in the coming weeks. Remix allows you to string together and edit short video clips. We covered the announcement of the online video editor last week, but got our hands on it this morning.
Remix is essentially a stripped-down version of [tag]Adobe Premiere Elements[/tag]. You get a timeline with clips and transitions, along with a source bin containing all the media from your Photobucket account. Adding clips to your movie is as simple as dragging and dropping. There's also a handy clipping tool if you feel like cutting out the boring bits. There are only three transitions to choose from, and they're all fades. This might seem like a letdown, but honestly if you've ever [tag]edited video[/tag] before, you know some of the flashier transitions aren't necessarily better than the fundamentals.
To put the finishing touches on your [tag]movie[/tag] you can add titles and all sorts of cheesy digital overlays, read more…
If you have a video iPod, you can save your movie on it and take it wherever you go.
The new 80 Gig video ipod can hold up to 100 hours of video! Portable video is a beautiful thing. When colleagues at work share photos of their children's halloween costumes or sports events, I whip out my video ipod and show my children in action. When I go camping and unpack the 85 pieces of my 4-room tent, I can watch the set up video instructions on my ipod.
I never leave home without my digital camera. When folks get the urge to take snapshots arises at parties, they look for me. So invariably, the next morning, I end up with all these snapshots and a dozen promises to email them.
I used to email them one at a time so the large file sizes won't clog up the email system. Then I learned to resize and shrink the photos so I can't attach a few pictures in one email. But looking at static pictures doesn't bring back the party to life and resizing photos is time-consuming.
Then my brother-in-law introduced me to PhotoShow Deluxe and I love it. It lets you turn your photos into a movie-like video slideshow with captions, titles, special effects and cool transitions in minutes. And the best part? It's free if you are a Comcast internet subscriber. 3 Steps to Creating a Music Photo Video Slideshow with PhotoShow Deluxe
