Animoto - Add a Bit of Zest to Your Slideshows

http://animoto.com/ - Animoto is a great web service that creates eye-catching audio-visual slideshows from your photos and music. You can upload your own photos or even fetch them from other services such as Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa. You can also upload your own music, or choose from Animoto's own diverse collection of genres and artists. Once your finished with that, Animoto will analyse your selection and create a great video slideshow. No two videos are ever going to be the same, and once you're done creating it, you can then view it, send it to friends, download it, upload directly to youtube, or embed it on a site of blog.

The service remains free only when you want to create 30 second videos. Any longer and you'll have to cough up some money. Full-length videos cost $3 each to make, or you can make an unlimited number of full-length videos for $30 a year. I was quite disappointed that the free video is only 30 seconds long, because it limits the number of pictures in your slideshow to about 20.

In all, I was quite happy with the production quality of the videos that Animoto creates. The service was created by tv and film producers, so, you can expect a certain level of quality from their presentation. Check out the video I made below from photos of a recent outing from last Saturday.