Have you ever wanted to transform your photos and video clips into engaging, professional videos that impress your audience?
You can with Animoto.
Animoto’s drag-and-drop video editor makes it simple and intuitive to create stunning videos for everyone. Plus, no video editing skill or any prior experience is required.
Whether you’re new to videos or consider yourself a connoisseur of the highest calibre, this smart tool can help to take your video creations to the next level.
Let’s look at Animoto in detail and see if it lives up to the hype.
What is Animoto?
Animoto is a web-based application that helps you to create engaging social media videos, slideshows, presentations for your business.
You’ll find many other video editing apps out there, but most of them require you to have video editing skills. Animoto doesn’t.
With Animoto Video Maker, creating high-quality is easier than you might think. If you can drag and drop, you can use Animoto!
It’s meant to be used by bloggers, marketers and small businesses.
With Animoto, you can have professional-looking videos for promotions and social media in a couple of minutes.
Most importantly, it’ll save you loads of time (and frustration), giving you more time for the things that matter most. 
Animoto provides you all the tools and features you need to design, such as:
- Quickly create professional videos by using their pre-designed templates.
- Access their library of stock images and videos. Choose from millions of stock photos, illustrations and videos provided by Getty Images.
- Select a song from thousands of licensed music tracks for your video, with no extra fee.
- Choose from a selection of 28 professional fonts, animated text effects, text size and color to customize your texts.
Here are the other things that you can easily do with Animoto:
- Create social videos to attract new followers
- Tell your brand story with videos
- Showcase your expertise with a step-based tutorial or how-to video
- Increase sales with videos ads and promotions
- Create video interviews
- Showcase your products or services with video demos and reviews
- Convert more business with video testimonials
- Record live streaming videos such as special events, exclusive broadcast, webinar etc.
- Use it to drive traffic to your blog/website
- Use it to grow brand awareness with professional-quality videos
- Make shareable videos such as a compilation of quotes that your fans can relate to and will love.
- and much more!
An In-Depth Look at Its Features
Let’s have a look at the most commonly-used features, one by one.
To start, you’ll need to sign up for Animoto with your email or Facebook ID (click here to claim your 30-day free trial)
(i) Storyboard Themes
The easiest way to get started is to make use of their dozens of professionally-designed video templates.
Simply choose one with a design that best suits for your project.
Here’re some of the ready-to-use templates:
- Behind the scenes
- Blog teaser
- Business story
- Company overview
- Editorial Quote List
- Holiday promotions
- List of tips
- Expert How-to and more.
(ii) Media Library: Getty images stock library
Animoto also offers users unlimited access to over 1 million high-quality Getty Images stock photos and video clips for free, as part of their subscription plans. Or You can upload your own video clips, images and other graphics.
Enter keywords into the search box to find stock images or video clips that match your brand.
(iii) Drag-and-drop Online Editor
With the visual page editor, What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG), making your own video has become much easier especially for total beginners.
You can rearrange the order, rotate, crop, or resize the image.
(iv) Customization: add text, music and branding
One thing great about Animoto is that you have complete freedom and full control over your video design.
Animoto lets you adjust colors, fonts, music, and even the animation effect of your text with the complete design tools and beautiful templates.
You can also change your video’s aspect ratio with just one click:
- Square (1:1): a good choice for Facebook or Instagram
- Landscape (16:9): Website, YouTube or widescreen displays.
Next, add your own song or pick one from thousands of licensed tracks in the music library that match your overall message.
Also, you have the option to trim the song, adjust the volume, set it to loop and play across the different slides or video clips.
Lastly, don’t forget to include your own logo for brand awareness. It’ll appear as a watermark in the corner of your video, making sure that your audience can see your logo with every view.
(v) Export And Share
Once you’re satisfied with your design, you can preview before downloading it.
Animoto offers numerous options for exporting. You can export to an MP4 video file or share it directly to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Youtube.
Besides that, you can copy the embed link and then easily paste it right onto your website or blog. You can also download the finished video to your computer or burn a DVD so you can easily share it with the world.
Pros of Animoto
1. It’s simple and intuitive
You can easily turn photos into videos with music using Animoto video maker, even if you’ve no prior video editing skills.
There’s virtually no learning curve. Its WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor is super easy to use and navigate.
Animoto has a wide collection of editable storyboard templates to get you started. All you need to do is find a template, replace the sample content with free stock photos and video clips and Animoto will do the rest. Easy.
2. You Save Time
Animoto is a huge time saver!
If you’re wasting countless hours capturing and editing your own videos for social media or business, then Animoto can help you take this time back.
Even better, you don’t necessarily have to use your own photos, images, or video clips.
Animoto has everything you need to create a video from start to finish, offering you beautiful templates, free images and videos, all in one place!
Simply drag and drop your stock assets and elements into the pre-made templates and you’re all set. So you can quickly create professional-quality videos in a matter of minutes.
3. You save Money
Although it costs to use Animoto after a free trial, it’s definitely well worth your money.
With Animoto subscription, you have unlimited access to Getty Images stock library. You can choose from millions of free high-quality illustrations, images and video clips for your project, with no additional charge.
If you’re looking to create a lot of videos, it’s a great deal. Because it’ll cost you $60 or more PER image if you’re buying images directly from Getty website.
4. Easy Social Media Sharing
Increase your video expoure by distributing it across multiple channels simultaneously from Animoto’s editor. This eliminates the steps of exporting and uploading videos to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
5. More Useful Tools and Features
Animoto has several other great features:
(i) Duplicate a video
You can create a copy of your existing video projects to use as a template for future projects, in one click.
(ii) Add or remove favorites
You can mark your images or videos as favorite so you can easily find them later in your Favorite Media. Simply click on the heart icon on any photo/video to add them to your favorite.
Cons of Animoto
1. Video Features Are Limited
There is no doubt, Animoto makes it exceptionally easy to create a professional video quickly and effortlessly, with no design skills needed. It’s particularly great for bloggers and marketers.
But if you’re looking for advanced editing tools and greater customization and control over your videos, you’ll need a higher-end editing software.
Also, I got fed up with the lack of an undo function to revert back to the most recent change I just made.
2. It’s not a free online video maker
You can take advantage of their free trial to test out this tool. But Animoto is not free after all.
How much does Animoto cost?
Let’s look at the details of Animoto plans, features and terms in the screenshot below:
If you prefer, you can continue your subscription with one of 3 plans offered by Animoto:
- Personal: This is the cheapest plan, costs as low as $8/month.
- Professional: This package offers many extra features and is recommended for bloggers, professional photographers, marketers. It costs $22 per month.
- Business: You get to enjoy all the features of the Professional plan + 30 minutes consultation with a video expert + add up to 3 team members to your account. $34 per month.
Conclusion
For those who don’t necessarily have video editing skills, Animoto is a fast-track way to produce great results with little effort.
Just create an account (no credit card required) and you can have your first video created in a few minutes.
Here’s how it works:
- Select a storyboard template.
- Upload your own photos and videos clips or choose from the library of Getty Images stock.
- Customize your video by changing colors, fonts, text, background and music.
- Finalize, produce and share it with your friends, family, and followers on social media, blog and anywhere you can think of.
Ready to get the most off your video marketing with Animoto?
Use Promo code: THANKYOU to get 20% OFF all New and Renewal Animoto Plans for a limited time!
Give Animoto a spin, take back your time, and start creating professional videos today!
What do you think of Animoto?
Are you using video as part of your marketing strategy? Share your thoughts and experience. We’ll like to hear from you and perhaps learn something new from you.
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