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I just listened to episode 49 of net@night with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte. This week they had Brad Jefferson on the show. Brad is the co-founder of Animoto. I really got excited when I heard what Animoto is and how easy it is to use the service.

I have been creating video slide shows for years now. I used to build the entire slide show in Final Cut Pro and manually set the ken burns effect by hand. Over the years it is getting easier and easier to build high quality slide shows that look amazing with little effort.

I am currently making a slide show using iPhoto for my father in laws 60th birthday. I found it really easy to quickly create awesome slide shows in minutes with little effort. However, these slide shows look a lot like some of my first slide shows I ever created. They look good, but do not have very much depth and emphasis to match the music, and highlight certain photos. To do this I would need to go into Motion and spend an afternoon using 3D effects, transitions, and motion effects to make the slide show look truly amazing. Who has that kind of time though, and we are just talking about a photo slide show here.

Enter Animoto. Animoto allows me to create the types of videos I mentioned with roughly no effort on my part. Simply upload your photos to Animoto, or choose existing photos online (Flickr). Select a song from their music library, or upload your own. Animoto will analyze the song’s tempo and emotion, and add motion effects to match the beat. It is truly amazing. But don’t take my word for it, try it out yourself. Also check out what I quickly made in 5 minutes.

I really would like to use this for my photography business, however Animoto is really not set up for commercial use at the moment. Brad mentioned they are looking at a commercial version for professional use in the near future. When that comes out I will adopt Animoto for all of my slide show projects.