Maybe some of you already know Animoto, this website that let's you upload images, music, and creates cool slideshows in a matter of minutes. Don't misunderstand me, Animoto is not one of these cheap slideshow thing like Rock You or Slide. Using their patent-pending Artificial Intelligence developed to think like an actual editor & director, the resulting video has the emotional impact of a movie trailer and the visual energy of a music video.
Animoto [iTunes Link] is now available in the AppStore, letting you create animated slideshows directly from your iPhone, and believe me, this app delivers!
You can start creating a new slideshow right after launching the app as no registration is required. Select 8 to 16 photos from your library, arrange them at your liking, select a song from Animoto's library and tap "create". It takes about 15 second to upload each image to Animoto's servers. Once all the images are uploaded, Animoto will start creating the slideshow, which takes a few minutes. At this point, you can quit the app, make yourself a sandwich and come back a few minutes later.
The newly created video slideshow will be available for viewing. You can then edit it or share it with someone, which is the whole point of this app. It will send an email to whoever you want to share the slideshow with, with a link to your video on Animoto's website. From there, you can do a bunch of things such as embedding it, uploading it to YouTube, etc...
I love this application but I do have a few feature requests... First, I would like to be able to login to my Animoto account so the videos are saved in my account. Right now, Animoto doesn't allow you to login from your iPhone so you won't be able to save these videos to your existing Animoto's account if you already have one. My guess is that this will come in the next update.
My second request is that it should be able to let you upload a song from your iPhone. The website let's you do it. You can just choose a song you have on your computer and upload it so you can use it in your slideshow. Now I believe that Apple won't let anyone access the music library on the iPhone. Besides, uploading music directly from your iPhone would take forever.
At any rates, Animoto is clearly my favorite app of the week! I was already sold on the website, so it wasn't too hard to make me an adept of the iPhone app... You can download Animoto from the AppStore for free here.
Here is a slideshow that I quickly made for demo purposes. If you have created your own slideshow, share it with us in the comments!