Dave Kaminski from Web Video University provides a video lesson on how to use the free video creator called Animoto. Dave shows how he clicks a few buttons to quickly put together a gorgeous video using nothing but some old photos that were sitting on his hard drive.
Watch the video, but then read further for some important caveats about Animoto.
Things to be aware of with Animoto
One thing that Dave doesn’t talk about is what you can and cannot do with your Animoto videos. It’s very important to read the Terms of Service (TOS) for Animoto. Here are some things I learned when I looked into it:
1) you cannot use the free version for anything commercial – such as promoting your website or services
2) if you subscribe to the commercial version for $249 a year, you can make videos promoting your own services but you cannot use it to make videos for clients
3) if your yearly subscription lapses, you are no longer allowed to show the videos that you made while under license. That strikes me as overly restrictive. Can you imagine having to remove all those videos from video sharing sites? What an administrative nightmare.
So basically, if you want to use Animoto just to make personal videos that serve no commerical purpose – then you can use the free version. If you want to make videos that promote your business, you must purchase the commercial licence. If you want to make videos for clients, you are out of luck (I suppose you could do it if each client purchased a commercial licence).
What’s the difference between the free and paid Animoto?
In addition to the ability to make videos that promote your own business, there are some other differences between the consumer (free) and the commercial (paid) Animoto accounts:
- For the commercial package, Animoto obtained a special license that allows commercial account users to use the tracks offered in the package as the soundtrack to their business videos. Traditionally, getting this sort of music licensing is very difficult to obtain, even sometimes for large companies that are producing commercials for TV.
- The Animoto-branding is much less blatant (especially toward the end of the video). To see an example, play the main video on this page (the video with the chef’s image).
- There are no watermark logos in the bottom-right and no link-back buttons to the Animoto site (but rather a more subtle “Powered by Animoto” logo off to the bottom right).
- Commercial account holders get an unlimited amount of DVD-quality download (normally $5 a download for consumers).
- Commercial users can slow down videos to half the speed at which they normally render (or twice as fast).
- Commercial account holders get to put “call back” buttons at the end of the video, linking the viewer to your company’s website.
My conclusion about Animoto
To try Animoto for yourself, visit them at http://www.animoto.com And if you want to learn how to make web video, I highly recommend Web Video University. I’m currently enrolled in Dave’s course and it is excellent.
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I don’t think Animoto is very useful for consumers either. I tried making a short video for my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, but the lack of customization and inability to easily edit the results caused me enough frustration to re-do it entirely using free Windows tools. See my review at http://davidwihl.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-not-to-create-video-photo-story.html