Nowadays when marketing online, video has to be part of your arsenal. But appearing in your own video can be daunting, and, you may feel the need to outsource the video production in order to get a professional look and feel.
This can be slow and inflexible. Imagine you’ll spend time and money getting a great video made, only to find you have to go around the same process in order to make a change to it, which isn’t practical.
There will be times when a professional video is required, but for many of the every day, quick videos that you need, you can do worse than use a service like Animoto.
We use Animoto often, and feel we’ve pushed it to its limits as far as communication is concerned. To do well with it, you will need a PRO account. Without a PRO account you can’t use the videos you create on your commercial sites. Note though, that even with a PRO account you cannot create videos for your commercial clients. Each commercial site has to have it’s own PRO account. I feel its important to point that out.
Animoto’s Good Points
The first good thing to say about Animoto is its ease of use. Anyone can make a convincing video with it, but most people only use Animoto for trailer type videos. I’ve used them for communication videos too, with some success.
- Anyone can make a video with Animoto
- Anyone can make a video with Animoto quickly
- You just upload some photos and a couple of very short video clips
- Add some text
- Select some music or upload your own
- Select a style
- Then click create – your video – 5 mins later it’s ready
Animoto’s Less Good Points
Here’s my wishlist for Animoto :
- I’d like to see voice added to Animoto. Right now you can really only do music effectively.
- Animoto have recently added a lot more video styles to the PRO account but they could do with even more.
- I’d like to see more stock images and video clips provided – as in hundreds more, with a greater variety of background color. A lot of the video clips are dark and these don’t look good in mostly light colored video styles, and vice versa.
- There isn’t enough room for text. Animoto only allows for text slides with two lines of text – 22 characters on the top line and 30 on the bottom. This is quite restrictive.
- Animoto does not allow for transparency so you can ‘t do anything clever with text overlaid on images dynamically, for example.
Tips On Using Animoto
- Get a PRO account – you can’t do anything until you do that.
- Write a lit of points you want to communicate using two lines of 22 characters and then 30 characters.
- Select some photos and either have the same number of photos as texts, OR fewer photos/videos than texts. I find that it’s better to have more textual slides and only to use a few images/videos to illuminate your written ideas.
- Don’t forget you can stretch an idea across two or three text slides (given the current restriction on text size
- Use instrumental music only as music with words will detract from your written message
