An email arrived yesterday from the guys at Animoto proclaiming that their application, which launches to the public on August 14th, would lead to the “end of slideshows.” Those are rather sensational words, but after taking a look at their app, they might just be right — at least in terms of what’s hot among the social networking set.
Animoto is a web application that renders unique photo montages using impressive motion graphics, effects, and transitions from photos and music that you upload. The software will render something unique on each pass, and the results will be radically different depending on the style of music you choose (i.e., fast paced rock will result in a higher energy, faster video than a slow, trippy electronica song).
The site is built with Ruby on Rails, and uses a liberal dash of AJAX (there aren’t too many full page loads on the site). Animoto also utilizes more than one Amazon web service. Though I wasn’t told which, my guess would be the S3 storage service and the elastic compute cloud service. The site uses Clearspring for their widget hosting.
The key to Animoto is their patent-pending “Cinematic Artificial Intelligence” software, which “thinks like an actual director and editor.” The software analyzes the pictures and music that you input and decides on the proper effects and transitions to match both.
Using Animoto is pretty straight forward. Choose which type of video you’d like to create — 30 second (about 12-15 images) or full length — then upload your images. The image uploader can upload more than one image at once, which is very nice (I used 31 images for my test video embedded below, and uploading each one at a time would have been a time waster).
Once you’ve uploaded your images, you drag and drop them into the order you want them to appear in the finished video, rotate any that need to be rotated, and highlight the ones you want the software to linger over. Then you upload your music or choose from their library (currently about 15 tracks) and render your video. The render process takes about 5-7 minutes, but could take longer depending on load. When you’re video is rendered, Animoto will email you, leaving you free to do other things if the queue for processor time is long. While the video is rendering, Animoto displays a handful of text ads (it doesn’t look like they’re paid ad spots yet, but certainly could be), which appears to be their business model right now.
The finished video product can be emailed or embedded, and Animoto plans to offer ways to download the video to your computer or iPod, or to burn it directly to DVD. You can also remix your projects, either by sending them through the Cinematic AI software again as is and seeing what new result pops out, or by tweaking the order and emphasis of your pictures and changing your music.
I was impressed with the quality of the videos Animoto created. They are more compelling than simple slide shows and I can see how this product could be very popular with social networking users. It is certainly conceivable that Animoto could enjoy the kind of rapid growth that popular MySpace slide show creation apps like Slide and RockYou! have experienced. Animoto could also be useful for jazzing up vacation photos or producing low budget music videos.
It would be great if you could restrict Animoto’s choices to specific effects and transitions, giving the user a little more control over the final output. That said, the software seemed to make pretty good choices on its own. One of the videos I created with Animoto (using photos from stock.xchng) is embedded below:
The world of webtop publishing (WTP) has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years, with plenty of services feeling as good, if not better, than many standard desktop packages. This is particularly true in the case of Microsoft Word-alikes such as Google Docs (née Writely), ThinkFree and Zoho Writer, which were featured in Josh Catone's excellent Self-Publishing Toolkit post earlier this week. In this post we’ll take a look at one stand-out service on the more visual end of the market – an online tool aimed at those who are familiar with the ‘print’ world’s standards such as Quark Express or Adobe InDesign. The service is FormatPixel, a Flash-based app that mimics the functionality of a desktop publishing app for the purpose of creating a visually stunning brochure web site without the need to break the bank.
FormatPixel has a thankfully simple registration process to endure before you can start playing around with your first project. You’ll need to choose which payment scheme to use. We chose the ‘Vanilla’ – or entry-level – scheme. This is free, but limits your account to just one project, and doesn’t allow you to export your projects as Flash files. On the plus side, whereas the starter version of other popular “freemium” apps, such as Basecamp, limit functionality on the entry level plan,the Vanilla level of this service includes access to every feature apart from the aforementioned export. There are three other packages to choose from, with the priciest (’Chocolate’) allowing the user to make 20 projects for $US80 a year.
We also opted to use the Beta version of the publishing application for this review, rather than the supposedly more stable version, because it included some extra animation features along with the standard feature set detailed below. We didn’t run into any issues with stability or flakiness in the Beta version, however, so we’d expect the standard, non-animating version to be just as slick.
Because it’s not pretending to be a whistles-and-bells publishing tool, it’s easier to create content right away with FormatPixel than learning the intricacies of a traditional layout program like Quark. Each of your projects is organized with thumbnails of the pages below the main editor frame, so navigation from one page to the next is straightforward. Once you’ve started drawing shapes on your pages, outlines of those shapes appear in the thumbnails, to aid your memory of what’s where (see picture below). You can select the dimensions of your backdrop too, should you want your project to look more like a widget or a blog than a standard magazine spread. Tracking guides have been added to help you keep consistent layouts from page to page, but unfortunately, the shapes and other object don’t ’snap’ to the guides as you would expect in a full-featured app.
Creating new shapes and text blocks is a one-click affair; editing those elements requires a double-click. Once you’re in edit mode, you can adjust colors with a handy RGB slider, and set some text and shape preferences such as outline and blend options. If you’re using the Beta version, those shapes (and other media) can have basic animation behaviors assigned to them, such as fades and slides. The animation is ‘playable’ via a timeline at the foot of the canvas that shows the actions in frames, a la Flash’s own timeline. Don’t expect Photoshop-like finesse of shapes and images, but for the purpose of presenting a decent online scrapbook, it’s more than adequate. One serious drawback though is the inability of the text blocks to accept images or other media themselves (meaning text would flow around the media). Also, forget about applying two or more columns of text to a block; you’ll have to settle with appending one block next to another. That said, we were impressed with just how streamlined and intuitive the interface was; it’s just a shame that for a layout tool, more thought didn’t go in to some of the quirks surrounding text blocks.
Probably FormatPixel’s most useful service is the ability to add links from shapes to either external URLs or different pages in your project. This makes creating clickable wireframes a snap. Anyone thinking that this tool could be used for early-stage prototyping, you’re right. (For the purposes of this review, I played around with the tool with exactly this intention – rapid development of a simple site design – and found it easier and quicker at the task than my typical wireframing tool, Microsoft Visio.) Finally, there’s your personal library of photo or Flash video media. You can import, crop and tag your photos and vids, or paste in a YouTube URL for FormatPixel to add the video to your library. Then it’s simply a matter of dragging your media to the right place on the canvas.
Once you’re happy with your project, you can publish it (or keep it private) to the growing directory of current galleries, comment on other folks’ work, and find out how many people have viewed your projects. You’re assigned a profile page too which lists your work and stats. And, as we mentioned earlier, paid users can export their projects as Flash files that they could insert in any site or presentation as Flash objects.
Conclusion
None of FormatPixel’s features will take your breath away (for that, we’re waiting to see what birds of paradise emerge from the Aviary); but what FormatPixel does, it does well, and does simply. The community is young, and in need of some sharp projects to act as showcases, but we can already see this starting to bloom, especially if FormatPixel offers a few more carrots to the most creative users, as well as beefs up the app’s feature set a bit. Photographers or graphic artists looking to publish their wares online in a stylish and interactive format will need to search hard to find a better alternative to FormatPixel.
What are your thoughts about FormatPixel? Know of a WTP product that blows this one out the water? Let us know in the comments.
