Creating videos with Animoto - and promotion for SmugMuggers!

tclifton

Hey everyone,

This is Tom, one of the guys at Animoto. We're all big fans of SmugMug over here (if you've made vids on Animoto.com, you know that SmugMug was in the first of the photo sites we supported) and so we thought we'd let you know two things:

1) We just released Animoto for Photography. A lot of you had asked for more control of your vids, so we introduced a speed control among other new stuff for photographers. Check it out here:

http://photography.animoto.com

2) We've got a promotion going for any SmugMug user. Get two months free with a year pass on Animoto for Photography. Check it out here:

http://photography.animoto.com/smugmug

That's it! Incidentally, we're playing around with allowing users to directly upload their Animoto vids to SmugMug, so let us know if that's a feature you would use. ALSO, as I do a lot of the new feature development, it would be great to hear any of your thoughts on how we're doing and where you guys think we could do better.

Thanks,
TOM

P.s. Anyone at the PhotoPlus Expo in NYC? Come find our booth! We'll be there until it ends, and I'll be around tomorrow morning.

P.p.s. Including a recent pic (D70) of me from a trip to India! Can you tell which one is I??

NomadRip

That's a great product. I've used it several times. Will check out the new stuff

docwalker

Tom,

I am one of the SmugMug support heros and an early user of your product. It is very cool. I hope to get a chance to play with it some more soon. I need to see how to tie it into the video suport with SmugMug and possibly a tutorial for it.

Keep up the good work.

--Doc

du8die

I did a quick demo today and have to say, WOW. Easy to use site. Pricing is awesome. Now, I've just got to prove to my wife that the pro account is worth the cash. I definitely think it is.

tclifton

Thanks for the kind words everyone! As you use Animoto more, please do give us critical feedback too--we love to hear what our users want and need.

TOM

NomadRip

I love the "Your email address has been changed" message, too

tclifton

NomadRip wrote:

I love the "Your email address has been changed" message, too

Thanks NomadRip! I wrote that and I love it too. But it's funny--I think we have to change it soon because some people have written in offended by it. I guess I can sorta see why (?), but really they just need to familiarize themselves with the Arnold soundboards:

http://www.thebluething.com/media/Arnold-Schwarzenegger

Shamguess

Hi Tom,
I really like your product and would love to be able to run it on my Smugmug pro site. Any update on progress? Will we be able to do it soon?
Thanks

shrekie

STEP-BY-STEP Tutorial on creating ANIMOTO video clips and embedding them into Smugmug
Hi Tom,

As you already know, I'm a big fan of ANIMOTO:)
I've already created a whole series of videos which I have embedded into different places within my Smugmug site and it's really livened it up, added another level of professionalism to it, as well as create huge spikes in my gallery stats:)

I've written a detailed Step-by-step tutorial on my blog on how to create an ANIMOTO video, convert, upload and embed it into your Smugmug galleries. Hope other Smugmuggers will find it useful:)

http://lookingglassphotography.posterous.com/step-by-step-tutorial-on-creat-0

Nelson

P.S Docwalker, hopefully this will save you from writing a tutorial yourself:)

SamirD

I just played with Animoto today. I have hundreds and thousands of car pictures and videos that could be turned into Animoto videos. But I have to figure out a business model that can support these besides making promotional videos quickly and easily. Any suggestions? I would probably need the commercial account, just like my pro account here at SM.

SamirD

I'm highly interested in Animoto, but noticed it would not pull larger images or videos directly from my SM account.

Andrew Maiman

Heard about Animoto for the first time at your booth at PDN PhotoPlus yesterday. Looks very interesting, I've been looking for a good (and easy) way to make video slideshows for a while now.

Just signed up for my account (it put smugmug in the promo code field since I signed up through my SmugMug account, I hope that still gives the $5 discount if I sign up for the $30/year account or maybe I should have used someone's referral code instead...)

Going to try making some 30 second clip tonight, and if I like it, I'll go ahead and subscribe.

Nice to see Smugmug partnering with Animoto, they will be a good fit together. Wish I had heard about Animoto earlier.

Awais Yaqub

I tried it, its great.

You are in the middle, behind Sardar G with turban

Mark Ledingham

I just signed up for an Animoto account before having read this post. And I used a promo code from another website(!). Is there any way for me to redo the promo so I can get the Smugmug offer instead? Any help would be appreciated.

AnimotoBecky

DM me and if the promo we're offering is greater than the one you used, I'll add on the difference to your account.

Mark Ledingham wrote:

I just signed up for an Animoto account before having read this post. And I used a promo code from another website(!). Is there any way for me to redo the promo so I can get the Smugmug offer instead? Any help would be appreciated.

AnimotoBecky

Hi Samir,

Do you mean the 5 MB image file cap we have? Not sure if that's something we'll be changing soon, but we do indeed have a 5 MB cap on images & 200 MB on video.

We actually gauge how highly demanded changes (like file caps) and features are wanted by our users via our feedback forum. Please check out:

http://feedback.animoto.com

and vote on the features/changes you'd like or start a new thread and get people to rally around your choice!

SamirD wrote:

I'm highly interested in Animoto, but noticed it would not pull larger images or videos directly from my SM account.

AnimotoBecky

Hi Samir,

Feel free to write me at rebecca@animoto.com with more information regarding how photographers are monetizing their Animoto for Photography (A4P) accounts, but in short:

1. A lot of portrait/wedding photographers re-sell videos a la carte to their customers after every session.

2. Another way photographers use us is include Animoto in a "premium" package that is more expensive. They kick off proofing sessions with an Animoto vid (which inevitably results in the client being utterly Wow'd), and then let them know the video that they are showing is available only in "such and such" package.

3. A lot of photographers use us for really clever marketing efforts. Beth Forester won the Professional Photographers Association (PPA)'s Marketing award with a great idea she had for getting vids on her clients' iPhones/iPods and branding the videos with our studio's logo. Info on that can be found at:

http://animoto.com/files/BethForester_BusinessPlan.pdf

Rod Evans is big on Facebook marketing, and we have a great interview with him located at:

http://biz.animoto.com/interview/rodevans.html

Let me know if that's helpful!

SamirD wrote:

I just played with Animoto today. I have hundreds and thousands of car pictures and videos that could be turned into Animoto videos. But I have to figure out a business model that can support these besides making promotional videos quickly and easily. Any suggestions? I would probably need the commercial account, just like my pro account here at SM.

Andrew Maiman

AnimotoBecky wrote:

We actually gauge how highly demanded changes (like file caps) and features are wanted by our users via our feedback forum. Please check out:

http://feedback.animoto.com

and vote on the features/changes you'd like or start a new thread and get people to rally around your choice!

I found the feedback forum, and must have triggered a bug or something because I now have -7 votes left.

My two biggest wishes are for video importing from Smugmug to work (it just gives errors now on every video) and for DVD quality to not cost $5 a pop.

Zanotti

Andrew Maiman wrote:

I found the feedback forum, and must have triggered a bug or something because I now have -7 votes left.

My two biggest wishes are for video importing from Smugmug to work (it just gives errors now on every video) and for DVD quality to not cost $5 a pop.

+1 on this comment. I signed up and paid the $30, but didnt realize that the low rez quality was almost unusable for photogs. I did a couple $5 upgrades and they are very nice.

I guess its effectively pay as you go pricing with a $30 sitting fee.

Nice product, but I wish there was a middle ground.

Andrew Maiman

Zanotti wrote:

+1 on this comment. I signed up and paid the $30, but didnt realize that the low rez quality was almost unusable for photogs. I did a couple $5 upgrades and they are very nice.

I guess its effectively pay as you go pricing with a $30 sitting fee.

Nice product, but I wish there was a middle ground.

Yeah...I understand that the DVD quality takes more processing power; but not $5 more. Maybe one or two free DVD ones per month (for people who have an all-access pass) and then $0.50 or $1 for additional ones?

Another option would be to allow a "low priority" option. For example, instead of paying $5, you would get it for free or cheap, but it would be processed in off-peak hours when the servers aren't as busy, so it might take 6 hours to get the finished render. This might not be feasible if you're doing the Rackspace/Amazon thing and spooling servers up and down as needed to eliminate excess capacity at off peak times, though.

SamirD

AnimotoBecky wrote:

Hi Samir,

Do you mean the 5 MB image file cap we have?

Actually, I wasn't aware of an image file size cap, but that's good to know.

The problem I saw was that it will pull the public images in the gallery vs higher resolution copies that it could since it has the SM login credentials.

For example, all my galleries are hidden/private and are locked down with no right click and the largest file size of Smugmug Medium. Instead of pulling the next larger size, which would be adequate for any size video, it pulled the Medium size and then displayed a notice about the file size on some of the vertical shots.

SamirD

AnimotoBecky wrote:

1. A lot of portrait/wedding photographers re-sell videos a la carte to their customers after every session.

2. Another way photographers use us is include Animoto in a "premium" package that is more expensive. They kick off proofing sessions with an Animoto vid (which inevitably results in the client being utterly Wow'd), and then let them know the video that they are showing is available only in "such and such" package.

3. A lot of photographers use us for really clever marketing efforts. Beth Forester won the Professional Photographers Association (PPA)'s Marketing award with a great idea she had for getting vids on her clients' iPhones/iPods and branding the videos with our studio's logo.

Thank you for the feedback. While these are excellent ideas for traditional photography, it doesn't help in my area of event photography.

I can use Animoto for marketing material, creating a video for each event and branded solidly with my web site. And maybe even compile these videos into a monthly DVD of some sort, but it's still a bit expensive and not automated enough. At $300/yr, I don't know how I'm going to get the financial return. If I sell 30 of the monthly DVDs, that's pretty easy. But that doesn't take into account any production time or distribution expenses. Just thinking out loud here. I want to find a way for this to work because I think quality videos has always been the missing piece in my content.

AnimotoBecky

Hi Samir,

Gotch ya. Just a quick clarification, the pro-account is $249.

I hear ya on wanting to recoup your expenses. I think if used effectively as a marketing tool, you can not only re-sell the vids, but get your studios' name out there as well by way of our your past clients sharing vids with their friends/family members. At any rate, if you have any questions regarding this (or anything else), feel free to write us at photography@animoto.com

SamirD wrote:

Thank you for the feedback. While these are excellent ideas for traditional photography, it doesn't help in my area of event photography.

I can use Animoto for marketing material, creating a video for each event and branded solidly with my web site. And maybe even compile these videos into a monthly DVD of some sort, but it's still a bit expensive and not automated enough. At $300/yr, I don't know how I'm going to get the financial return. If I sell 30 of the monthly DVDs, that's pretty easy. But that doesn't take into account any production time or distribution expenses. Just thinking out loud here. I want to find a way for this to work because I think quality videos has always been the missing piece in my content.

richb3

Smugmug promo
I am a smugmug user and used the 3 month trial subscription for Animoto buisness want want to renew for one year. Do you have a current promo code I can use to soften the blow of the $249 annual fee?

thanks,

Richard Burton

tclifton wrote:

Hey everyone,

This is Tom, one of the guys at Animoto. We're all big fans of SmugMug over here (if you've made vids on Animoto.com, you know that SmugMug was in the first of the photo sites we supported) and so we thought we'd let you know two things:

1) We just released Animoto for Photography. A lot of you had asked for more control of your vids, so we introduced a speed control among other new stuff for photographers. Check it out here:

http://photography.animoto.com

2) We've got a promotion going for any SmugMug user. Get two months free with a year pass on Animoto for Photography. Check it out here:

http://photography.animoto.com/smugmug

That's it! Incidentally, we're playing around with allowing users to directly upload their Animoto vids to SmugMug, so let us know if that's a feature you would use. ALSO, as I do a lot of the new feature development, it would be great to hear any of your thoughts on how we're doing and where you guys think we could do better.

Thanks,
TOM

P.s. Anyone at the PhotoPlus Expo in NYC? Come find our booth! We'll be there until it ends, and I'll be around tomorrow morning.

P.p.s. Including a recent pic (D70) of me from a trip to India! Can you tell which one is I??

AnimotoBecky

Hi Richard,

I know you already PM'd me, but feel free to reach me via e-mail too with details:

rebecca@animoto.com

richb3 wrote:

I am a smugmug user and used the 3 month trial subscription for Animoto buisness want want to renew for one year. Do you have a current promo code I can use to soften the blow of the $249 annual fee?

thanks,

Richard Burton