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?

Animoto is a fun way to add some hollywood to your old, dull, same as everyone else's slideshow. You know those family vacation, special event, or even worse - yawn corporate outing or shareholder meetings. Animoto isn't the kiss of death to Powerpoint unfortunately, but it will add some zip and keep people's eyes open when it's "your turn" to show 'em something.

In beta, Animoto is a web application that generates a professionally produced video with music using your photos. At its core is a technology that analyzes and combines your images and music with the post-production savvy of a hollywood film editor. Below is a sample video produced in 5 minutes (or less) for this post.



The service is free for as many 30 seconds videos as you want, or $3 each for extended length videos. They also have a $30 annual pass that provides unlimited access. While you do have the option of uploading your own music, Animoto has a slick library of its own divided into 3 groups, Indie Rock, Electronica or Hip Hop.

You have the option of emailing your video, embedding it on your blog or website and posting it as a widget on your social network of choice. See screenshot below:


Nice touch is you retain all rights to your content. Animoto assumes no copyright to your material. And coming soon is the ability to download videos to your computer, and send videos to your cellphone.

We like Animoto's no hassle ease of use and its professional results. We definitely would like to see the ability to add your own captions or titles, maybe even illustrations to further customize your creation - and with that perhaps less reliance on the overdone, stick a fork in it, the ever present, Powerpoint presentation.

The founders of Animoto are veterans of the entertainment industry and are headquartered in NYC.