Animoto - produce your own MTV video on Facebook

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Photo, Video, Social Software

Animoto - produce your own MTV video on Facebook

by Dolores Parker Mar 27th 2008

We've covered Animoto before. It's a rocking web app that allows you to create a music video with your own photos or video in about 5 minutes or less. Now, Animoto has recently won the Film/TV Web award at the 2008 SXSW conference and has some new features we thought deserved a revisit.

For starters, Animoto has a new Facebook app which allows you to produce unlimited free 30 seconds spots using your Facebook photos. If any of your photos are tagged with your Facebook friends' names, they too will get an alert in their News Feed informing them.

If you're not too excited by that, (is it possible to get excited by Facebook apps anymore?), you can also now export any of your Animoto videos directly to YouTube by clicking a little button. The beauty here is there's no video camera or video editing software required to produce professional results.

And there's the ability to post your videos to most every social network around, like: MySpace, Friendster, Blogger, TypePad, Freewebs, Webwag, Pageflakes, Netvibes, Windows Live.com, iGoogle, Orkut, Hi5, LiveJournal, Xanga, myYearbook, LiveSpaces, Tagged, Multiply, BlackPlanet, Eons, Piczo, and Vox.

In our previous post, we said we wanted the ability to add text to the photos. Apparently that idea has registered with Animoto but it is not live yet. A work around is to add your text to a photo and save it as a JPG or GIF and upload it like your other photos. They are also still working on the ability to send videos to cellphones and downloading videos to your computer.

No word yet on a Lessig Method video tool. Now, wouldn't that be something?

Tags: animoto, Facebook, music video, MusicVideo

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

whiskey said 9:58PM on 3-28-2008

Downloading Animoto videos is not such an impossible task... The thing is that they want you to go premium to do so (when in fact you download said video to your pc while viewing it)... So to me it's a bit ridiculous.

So, just "because you can", add the AddBlocker Plus extension (or Add On as they call it nowadays); once it's there (you will have to restart your Firefox), you will notice a stop sign with the letters ABP (acronym for AdBlock Plus)...
This icon, when right clicked, shows you a menu. Select the Open Blockable items... write flv (mp3 work on places that play mp3 files) and let it filter the list for you... If you are at a page that has an animoto video, then you will be able to see a link. Now just rightclick it and copy it's address to that other wonderful "download-streaming-content", Orbit Downloader...

A bit of work? Yes, but, since those are your images, and the music there is presented to you at no charge (and if you do not remove the unobtrusive animoto logo at the end of your vid).... then you have an FLV video that you can convert (Riva FLV converter... remember that trick?) or add to your website using the same player (JW FLV Player) or any other you like.

Of course, this is presented just for your education (and mine)... I just hope they start providing the download link to the FLV file directly (which is like one option at the JW FLV Player they use)...

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

View more Time Wasters