This week I received two notes from attendees to a recent conference. Both raved about their new favorite tech tool, Animoto, which lets you take photos and video clips and make a multimedia video in just a few clicks. Here’s my favorite part of one of the notes:
Can we just talk about ANIMOTO? Changed my professional life. At this point, I’ve only used it to make one video….but still. My head is spinning just thinking of all the ways we can use this tool to make our communications better, more effective, and more professional. I’m pretty sure it is going to change my personal life as well.
If I had gotten nothing else out of  [the conference], it wouldn’t matter. This one tool ALONE will save my company so much time and help us to communicate so much better with our members.
Wow. I love my job.
Animoto is truly simple to use from both a mobile device or your computer. Here are a few of my best practices for making a professional-looking video in minutes.
- Give the video a little more variety by highlighting every few pictures rather than having them all appear for the same length of time.
- Don’t just take pictures — add video clips! You can mute them so that they don’t play over the soundtrack.
- If you’re telling a story with your Animoto, make liberal use of the text slides.
- Invest in the $30/year upgrade so you can make videos longer than 30 seconds. It’s worth it.
- If you want to track video views, hook your animoto account to your YouTube channel so you can upload new videos with just one click.
- If you’re showing the video on a big screen, pay the $5-10 for a higher quality resolution so it looks great on screen.
- Some of the templates do a better job with photos and logos that are not standard photo sizes. Be careful that you don’t choose one that crops your pictures.
- Stick to the Animoto music library for work projects to avoid copyright infringement issues that might arise if you use music from your own library.
- If you want to fine tune a video you’ve created on your mobile device, just publish the video then go to the Animoto site on your computer. You’ll be able to edit a copy.
- You can really play around with the speed of the photos and more options with the online app. The mobile apps are for very quick, basic videos.
I did an Animoto for “Committee Day” at one of our big meetings. You were right, I am now a rock star at my association! Love it, love it and need to figure out how to do more (like captions for the pix, like you did in your Hawaii vacation video). Thx SO MUCH for this cool tip at the Great Ideas conference!