Like most photographers who have been at it for a while, I've been putting together slide shows of my work since the days of multiple slide projectors, four track recorders, and special projector synching equipment. With the advent of software like Photodex's Pro Show, it has gotten considerably easier, assuming you have your digital images organized and ready to go. Though it has been around for a couple of years, I've just gotten around to trying out the on-line slide show maker at www.animoto.com, and so far I'm liking it quite a bit. It doesn't serve all of my slide show needs, but when I need to put something together quickly without thinking too hard, it's great. Check out this introduction to my work that I put together yesterday:
Once you've chosen your photos and uploaded them to the site (they have a Lightroom plug-in if you want to automate this process), it only takes about a minute to pick a style and the music from their royalty free library before your slide show video gets processed. It's easy to rearrange your images and/or video clips into any order you want, but if you want to just let Animoto take over, you can have it randomly shuffle your media. That's what I did with this slide show because I just wanted to put something together without thinking too hard, but I think it did almost as good a job as I would have.
The free version of Animoto is good enough to try it out, but you'll need to opt for one of their pricing plans if you end up doing anything longer than 30 seconds, or if you want access to a greater variety of styles or music.
There are other sites with similar features (flixtime.com, onetruemedia.com), but I haven't tried those yet and Animoto seems to be the most popular at this point in time.
If you give Animoto a try, post a link in the comments - I'd love to see it!
Hi Jerry. I just recently discovered Animoto myself, and have really enjoyed it. It’s fun as well as being done quite well. Here a some slideshows I did. The music is my son’s compositions/productions. Please let me know what you think.
http://msummersphoto.com/galleries-2/
Great work Margaret. I especially liked the Bears video, and your son’s music is beautiful. Do you remember the name of the Animoto style you used on Flowers of Spring – that was pretty cool.