animoto - CADA Convention 2012

Animoto is great for making slideshows that are "dead simple." Here are some highlights of what we're talking about today in my presentation.

HERE IS THE AWESOME STUFF . . .

• First, here's an example of a video I made for a spring break East Coast trip (booked through CADA Platinum Sponsor USA Student Travel, I might add)

• Animoto offers free limited accounts to the general public. Limited accounts can create videos that are, at maximum, 30 seconds in length.
• Animoto also offers FREE educator accounts. This means you and your students can create projects of any length.
• You can incorporate a combination of photos, title slides, and videos
• You can use their stock music or upload music of your own. Be aware of copyright laws and how your school district interprets those laws.
• Your finished product for something that's basic web-quality (240p) is totally FREE.
• Animoto offers an iPhone app to edit a video right from your phone!
• Animoto makes you look like you spent days on a "Hollywood-style" video slideshow
• Animoto is cloud-based. You can start your project on one computer, and then switch computers to continue working.
• Animoto offers a number of themes to work with
• Animoto just kinda "knows" what the tempo of your song is and matches the pace of the slides to your music
• FOR ADVANCED USERS: with Animoto you can "stitch" together an end-of-year slideshow. Give each team a segment of your end-of-year video, and then once they have completed their finished product you can connect all the separate projects together to form one giant Voltron of a project using software like iMovie or Final Cut. You can then use whatever music you'd like for your final project and edit it accordingly

BUT KEEP THIS IN MIND . . .

• You do have to pay for higher resolution downloads, but it's reasonably priced ($3 for 480p; $5 for 720p resolution). If you're going to show this on a projector in the gym to 2,000 students, fork over the $5.
• There is currently no Android app available.
• Streaming is sometimes an issue unless your internet connection is blazing fast. You should ALWAYS download the video completely to your computer before showing it at school.
• Some of the themes that look really cool are only available with a PRO account. Pro accounts cost $99/3mos or $249/year. PRO accounts do give you access to unlimited high-res downloads, but they're prohibitively expensive for most school settings.
• Feature set does a lot of stuff automatically for you. This is good if you just want Animoto to do all the thinking for you; maybe not so good if you want to have more control over the details of your project.
• With the free educator account, you are forced to have the animoto.com logo at the end, which is not there if you pay and get the PRO account. A simple work-around is to put the video through editing software and edit out that splash at the end.
• Some CNET reviewers say that customer service is not very responsive. I have never had to use customer service and I have created 14 different projects so far in the past two years with Animoto with no problems at all.