Animoto

Animoto makes designing videos easy. Falling somewhere between a proper video editing application like Final Cut Pro and photo collage software like Fotar, Animoto allows you to take photos, video clips, and text and combine them together into a watchable video even if you possess little technical knowledge. Their pricing plans are scaled to the needs of individuals, independent professionals, and businesses, and the capabilities they can accomplish for these three groups are varied. Animoto Memories is the most simple format of the Animoto suite, but it has most of the tools that personal users might demand in a video collage platform. Its goals are narrow and simple, but what it does, it does well. You start by picking a style for your slideshow, and the template interface offers dozens of options to choose from. From here, all you have to do is order and upload your content and then tell the software to create a video. Users can even select music from a number of royalty free options. Over 350 songs are available, and both short video clips and photos are supported. While users have little control over editing options on their videos, this is both a strength and a disadvantage. There aren't enough tools here for creators to do much that's truly innovative with their videos, but the simplified format means that even users with no experience can hop in the app and put together a new slideshow video in a matter of minutes. Video quality of up to 720p is supported, but only landscape videos are supported, and each video is tagged with an Animoto logo at the end. Photographers and business owners will want to upgrade to a plan that includes Animoto marketing, as this allows for greater flexibility and opens up a range of new options for users. All plans with Animoto marketing allow resolutions as high as HD 1080p, and they offer square marketing videos in addition to traditional landscapes. Animoto is committed to turning their software into a tool that photographers can use to create animated portfolios, and it seems like a great alternative to the more expensive and unnecessarily complicated video editing platforms for such a simple task. Marketing accounts offer more styles, the addition of template storyboards, and thousands of licensed songs to create more attractive videos. They also do away with the Animoto branding that appears at the end of videos. Customized fonts and colors also come supported. The professional plan is a great choice for photographers, as it comes with a license to resell videos to consumers, but the business plan is a necessity for larger scale businesses. This is focused primarily on creating arresting marketing videos, and it comes with a license to resell to businesses as well as consumers. While this is the main selling point for the business plan, it also allows multiple users to access the same account.