Chris Anders - Internet Strategy Consultant

http://animoto.com

Animoto is a great tool to put together simple video presentations - essentially a series of animated stills set to music. The system is very easy to use and it only takes a few minutes to put together a simple video presentation. On the downside advanced editing controls are limited so you may have to play around with the end result to get a video that suits.

How it works

To get started you create a user account and select whether to make a short 30 second video or a full length one.

You then simply upload images from your hard drive and order them in the sequence you want to display them. You can also add additional slides with Text to provide an introduction to the video and commentary on the animated slides content.

The next step is to choose a music track. You can choose from a number of preloaded tracks in the animoto.com library or alternatively upload your own music.

Finally if you are making a full length video you can choose whether your images should be displayed at twice , normal or twice the standard speed.

You then add a title and brief description and hit "create video". The system then automatically checks the images, analyses the music and creates a video slide presentation for you.

Posting the Video to your website

Having created your video it's easy to download it, export it to YouTube or send it by email. To add it to your website the easiest thing to do is to click onto the "Pin" icon, select "Embed" and then "Other Sites". Copy the code that appears onto your web page and the video will be embedded onto your site.

Tips

Choose music that reflects the "tone" of your video. For example for a fundraising event a faster beat will result in a more rapidly adimated video sequence. For charity videos that are e.g. more serious in nature a slower beat results in less frenetic animation.

Use the spotlight facility to select images you want to highlight - this also slows the pace of the animation down somewhat.

If you don't like the end result - re-edit it and render it again - the results are different each time.

If you are producing a full length video use the image pacing tool and try changing it to 1/2 speed if you want greater emphasis on each slide.

Costs

You can create a personal account free of charge but are limited to creating a certain number of full length videos. You can buy additional full length video credits on a "pay per video" basis which currently cost US$3 each. For businesses the cost is currently $99 per quarter for an unlimited number of videos - check out http://business.animoto.com/

At present there are no discounts for non-profits.