This is the third part of my Photo Tips Blog on Animoto I have now had chance to use this slideshow creation software several more times and have just created my first wedding slideshow with it ,which was one of the original purposes for buying the professional license for this software, and have posted this slideshow here for you to see.
Since about 2005 I have been using PicturesToExe as way of creating customer slideshows, it is fairly inexpensive software that allows for a good deal of creatively and most importantly protected my images as they are embedded into the exe file and therefore are very difficult to get to. My reasons for looking for alternative software was originally due to the fact that PicturesToExe whilst producing excellent slideshows for PC does not to my knowledge support Apple Mac which more and more clients own, and even though it will produce videos for conventional DVD playing I have never found the quality of these to be very satisfactory.. Also possibly more importantly as Mr Dylan wrote "the times they are a changing" more photographers are offering clients their high resolution images on disk as part of their packages so the need to protect images is reducing, and if anything to maximise on our own marketing we want clients to share our work with as many people as possible. They certainly want to be able to show Gran on her DVD player, their cousins in America by internet link and also want to watch the show themselves on a large screen at home all without understanding resolution issues and the difference between internet low resolution and high resolution quality images.
So enter Animoto which appears to address these issues although the creation of slideshows is on line so there are issues uploading large files, but you can do other things while this is happening, well if you have several computers you can, it is also worth uploading images of at least 1500 pixels because you can then render a full HD video.
Up to now my Animoto slideshows have been very easy to produce with only a small number of images, a wedding is rather different especially if you have had 3 photographers shoot it ..which means you have a larger number of images to trawl through to select the ones you want for a slideshow, in the past I have created 20 min plus shows with some 500-600 images. For Animoto we are talking of a maximum of 300 images, and to be honest that is too many unless you use your own music, Animoto currently doesn't have many tracks over 8 mins so that would be one image every 1.6 secs ...ideally I would say ever 3.5 seconds so the images can be absorbed. So I would say for 8 minutes about 200 images is comfortable, the 280 I have here is a little fast, but still just about works although ideally I would have liked a track of almost 10 minutes to remove the slightly rushed feel. As I also said this means limited music choice and although Animoto is constantly adding to it's library of royalty free music it really could do with more longer tacks in my opinion.
I do think this software is worth serious consideration, I know there is some very slick software out there like Proshow Gold but you still have issues of music copyright etc unless you shop for your own royalty free music and these Animoto shows are very slick and are being added to with more and more themes. It would certainly give this software 8/10 as it currently stands.