Today, among other things video is very much “flavor of the month”.

About a year ago I came across a lady called Lorraine Grula who was giving some excellent advice about buying a video camera. Lorraine (a professional in all aspects of video production) certainly knows her stuff and a look at her website will find an enormous amount of free practical advice on all aspects of video production.

Further to that she recently mentioned a new website which is quite interesting. This is Animoto’s site where you can upload your photos and they will create a video using the photos, and set it to music.

You can join for free and actually get a short 30 second video, with music, again for nothing, consisting of no more than 15-20 of your photos.

This is just a quick sample that I made from some vacation photos – no claims to artistic merit, just a sample )
It is very easy to do this and you can then share this via email, Facebook, YouTube, blogs etc.

This is fun – and a whole new way to show your photos to family, friends – in fact the whole world!

However, on a more serious note you can get longer videos made, there are business and education options, and also you can upgrade your video to DVD quality.

There is quite a lot you can do, and I am still pondering the business application aspects myself, but you can access the site, and there is a comprehensive FAQs section where you can find out about all the options.

Animoto came out of beta in August so I think that there will be more interesting developments in the pipeline. Worth a look.