As of August 14th apparently traditional slide shows will be a thing of the past. Animoto combines your photos and music and creates a pretty nasty trailer-like video. Their competitive edge comes from their super secret AI technology which somehow determines how to display your photos according to the music.

I’m going to go through the process of creating a video right now because I’m pretty jazzed to see what it can do. So far their site’s interface is awesome. I hardly realize I’m using it - it’s so well laid out.

The only difficult part has been trying to figure out how to get music off my iPod to upload to this thing. So the audio file is uploading now, I’m curious to see how they plan on creating a 30 second clip from a 2:30 long mp3 file.

So what they’ve done is loaded up my song into a little media bar and they’ve asked me to select an entry point for the song. I like the simplicity but unfortunately, when I try to play my song, I hear nothing. I imagine it probably works fine for everyone else, but check one up for moderate glitches so far.

In the meantime, I’ve noticed some interesting little icons at the bottom which say “coming soon” when you mouse over them. Looks like they’re planning on making these videos available for 1) the iPhone 2) download 3) a video iPod & 4) DVD/CD, at this point this means it’s only sharable online. The bloggers and MySpace kids are going love this.

…they even give you some videos to check out while you’re waiting for yours to finish…

… ok it’s done (~2 minutes) Holy crap my screen shots are sweet:

http://animoto.com/play/73b27a85ccc29ed9154d3a0670159c57

Basically you’re going to be using this soon. I can’t really say anything else, it really speaks for itself. In fact you should go now and make one now.

I have an update: I can’t stop watching my video. I can’t pinpoint it but the combination of music with the graphics + the transition effects are DEAD ON. Whatever technology they’re using is unreal.

Another update: Here’s a remixed version of the same video:

http://animoto.com/play/d3cea78d347ef8492245a26508e115ce

I can’t imagine I’m going to stop messing with this thing any time soon… I wonder if they could integrate this technology with the Flickr API and just tell it to go remix whatever search. I’m pretty sure they can pull photos from your Flickr account but I’m not sure if they could do a search term.

Closing update: Their full length videos are $3 each or you pay $30 for the year for unlimited videos. $30 isn’t bad considering the potential viral impact of this service. It’ll be interesting to watch how long the novelty will last once everyone starts using it. Bottom line is the videos are incredible. Regardless of the novelty, everyone will experience the initial shock and start racing to upload their photos.