Who doesn’t love a cute video montage? I enjoy watching short family films, Vacation Bible School highlights or even the best clips from a wedding. I like making memories, but I also take pleasure in preserving them. Animoto is a video creator that can help anyone make videos like a pro. The site, www.animoto.com boasts an easy-to-use platform, sample videos, pre-licensed music, and a free sample trial. There are different subscriptions to choose from depending on your needs. Most notable is the crazy-simple process Animoto has developed for users to make videos without a substantial time investment. I’m going to tell you a few things about this website, and if you stick with me until the end, I have a surprise video I created for my husband for Valentine’s Day! I’m TOTALLY going to challenge you to make one for your special someone. It’s easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy (as my kids say.)
There are 5 outstanding aspects of Animoto that I’d like to highlight. The characteristics that set this program apart are the capabilities, ease of use, pricing, pre-styled templates and cloud storage.
Capabilities : Animoto allows you to upload both pictures and videos. You can choose from any number of these places to upload your pictures. I especially appreciate that you can upload images straight from Facebook. I have more photos on Facebook than my laptop, so this feature is appealing.
As you can see at the bottom under “Our Collection” Animoto offers users the choice of their own stock video clips and photos to enhance your video if you don’t have the footage you were envisioning or if you would like to use something higher quality than what you have on file.
Animoto also offers you the ease of adding captions to pictures or stand alone text to break up the photos a bit. You can see this highlighted in the Valentine’s video (at the end of the post) that I made for my husband.
Ease of Use: I know just the idea of video creating seems complicated, but it’s not. You basically highlight a bunch of photos you’d like to make a slideshow with, throw in a video clip or two and then Animoto does the work for you. You can select a different song if you want, or just leave the one that Animoto suggests. I challenge you to give it a try. It’s not hard and even someone who doesn’t feel techy at all, can handle this! Share it on social media, then tag me and I’ll cheer you on!
Pricing: There are three different pricing plans/subscription options. There is a chart below the options to clearly describe what you are getting with each plan. You can pay monthly or annually. You can find more about a plan that works for you by clicking here.
Pre-Styled Templates: One of my favorite things about Animoto is the selection of styles for your video. I also LOVE, LOVE, LOVE that if you choose a style that you later decide isn’t quite right, you can switch it without having to re-load your photos. Oh my goodness, I have done this so many times. I choose one style, load my photos/video clips, and then later on I decide I wanted a little different feel. The first time I tried it, I was nervous that I would lose my work. However, I didn’t. Whew!
Whoever decided to include this feature has my deepest thanks. You can switch things around and preview the video as many times as you need until you are 100% satisfied. Then, even after you publish the video you still can edit it later if you find a typo or change your mind about a photo! I also have used this feature MANY times!
Cloud Storage: Not to be forgotten is Animoto’s ability to store all of your videos so you don’t have to. This doesn’t cost extra. Each of the plans allow for you to store all of your work online. You won’t have to worry about emailing a video to yourself to save, downloading it, or transferring it to Dropbox. Animoto keeps your final products as well as the videos still in progress.
Animoto does an excellent job of preserving your videos. I have a video from 3 years ago still saved and sitting safe and sound in my Animoto video library. Below you’ll see a screenshot of a portion of the video’s I’ve made. I like the way Animoto stores them- neat and tidy with a nice thumbnail image to jog your memory of what the video looks like.
Animoto has been my go-to video maker for the past three years. It has worked in a pinch, but it has also handled larger projects that I’ve done which included more than one song and a large volume of photos.
Animoto has a new Marketing Video Builder which I haven't even tried yet. It has more customization tools, such as playing with fonts and resizing captions. It's on my list of things to try in 2017! :)
Overall, I am very satisfied with Animoto which is why I’ve been using it for 3 years!
Now, without further ado, I’d like to share the video I made for my sweet man, this Valentine’s Day. If you end up making it all the way to the end, you might find our wedding kiss to be a bit much. I did too, but in the best kind of way! ;)
#allthefeels,
Lindsey Feldpausch :)
Disclosure: This is a sponsored post. Opinions are 100% my own.
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