Animoto/Smugmug

steph

I was thinking of subscribing to Animoto. I made a trial 30 second video, exported it to my Smugmug gallery. Noticed it was still processing on Smugmug an hour and a half later. I sent a email to help and got the usual, 'your mileage may vary' reply, explaining how many factors influence the transfer time. In other words, no reply to my request for an 'average' time quote on transferring a generic Animoto 30 second video.

Six hours later, the 30 second video is STILL processing and not yet uploaded. I can't imagine how long a longer slideshow might take. Pretty disappointing because I would think I should be able to offer a client a link the same day I transfer the slideshow to my site.

Is this usual, or the exception to the rule?

Thanks

Andy

Exception. We're having a lot of video uploads today, sorry!

steph

Good to know, thanks.

Andy wrote: »

Exception. We're having a lot of video uploads today, sorry!

Camara Photography, LLC

I was really excited to see that Animoto was now offered as a smugmug partner / feature, so I tried do do a free, 30 second show to test it...

When I select photos to add, I get this: "This image is smaller than the recommended landscape size of 1024x768 for high-resolution videos.", when the originals are WELL over that size. WHY, or how do I fix it?

Also, can a 30 second slideshow be put in a gallery as a "teaser", to sell to clients? If so, can clients purchase it (a full length version) directly from smugmug (as a digital file)?

steph

Frustration.

Eight hours has passed and now the video/Animoto folder is empty. No file 'processing'. It's on the Animoto site but missing from my the folder that it was transferring to.

I am a new Pro User and I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if something is wonky.

Any ideas on where the video would go after it was done processing via Smugmug? I just assumed it would stay where I directed it?

steph wrote: »

I was thinking of subscribing to Animoto. I made a trial 30 second video, exported it to my Smugmug gallery. Noticed it was still processing on Smugmug an hour and a half later. I sent a email to help and got the usual, 'your mileage may vary' reply, explaining how many factors influence the transfer time. In other words, no reply to my request for an 'average' time quote on transferring a generic Animoto 30 second video.

Six hours later, the 30 second video is STILL processing and not yet uploaded. I can't imagine how long a longer slideshow might take. Pretty disappointing because I would think I should be able to offer a client a link the same day I transfer the slideshow to my site.

Is this usual, or the exception to the rule?

Thanks

Andy

steph wrote: »

Frustration.

Eight hours has passed and now the video/Animoto folder is empty. No file 'processing'. It's on the Animoto site but missing from my the folder that it was transferring to.

I am a new Pro User and I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if something is wonky.

Any ideas on where the video would go after it was done processing via Smugmug? I just assumed it would stay where I directed it?

Send a link to your gallery and details of this thread to us, please write our Support Heroes - we'll give you personal attention from our help desk thanks.

steph

Thanks Andy. I did receive a reply from a Support Hero. I'm pretty impressed with how quickly someone gets back to you, Nice!!!!

Anyway, my two videos are now missing entirely, gone from the Animoto gallery. The support hero says there was a lot of traffic yesterday and to try again today. So instead of having Animoto transfer and then Smugmug process, I've downloaded from Animoto and then uploaded to my Smugmug gallery hoping that would be faster but unfortunately it's not. Apparently this is an all day task? Animoto suggests that the processing can take up to one hour for Smugmug to process, hence my disappointment, that's just not at all true.

I'm just trying to figure out a workflow here, so will keep playing with it. But it would be helpful if tech support would simply tell me if I could expect to view an uploaded video within say 24 hours? Newbie frustration on my part :-)

Andy

steph wrote: »

Thanks Andy. I did receive a reply from a Support Hero. I'm pretty impressed with how quickly someone gets back to you, Nice!!!!

Anyway, my two videos are now missing entirely, gone from the Animoto gallery. The support hero says there was a lot of traffic yesterday and to try again today. So instead of having Animoto transfer and then Smugmug process, I've downloaded from Animoto and then uploaded to my Smugmug gallery hoping that would be faster but unfortunately it's not. Apparently this is an all day task? Animoto suggests that the processing can take up to one hour for Smugmug to process, hence my disappointment, that's just not at all true.

I'm just trying to figure out a workflow here, so will keep playing with it. But it would be helpful if tech support would simply tell me if I could expect to view an uploaded video within say 24 hours? Newbie frustration on my part :-)

we're having large video volumes this weekend. It's unusual. But your vids should not be 'missing' let's stay on the help desk, ok?

Andrew Maiman

Yeah, the queues are very long this weekend, which is to be expected since they enabled HD video for Power users this week and everyone (myself included) is re-uploading everything to take advantage of it. My videos have been taking about 12,000 to 15,000 seconds in the queue, which is much longer than normal, but I don't fault them for it. No point in Smugmug paying a fortune in Amazon EC2 compute time, the re-uploads don't need to be up instantly since the old ones are still there until the replacements go through.

I think I read somewhere that Pro accounts always go to the front of the queue, so that should help your times a bit. Since Pros already had HD video before, I would guess that they should be able to get ahead of us Power users re-uploading all of our stuff (as they should).

SamirD

I played with Animoto and SM for a bit, but found that there's too many technical limits and issues to use it seriously...for now.

Animoto promised they were working on development on their side, but judging from your post, it's about the same as it was when I tried it.

AnimotoBecky

Hi Samir,

We did fix a few issues just this week. There were some issues when people weren't Pro/Power users, so transferring of assets would get confused. That's been fixed.

And I'm psyched to report that Animoto now exports the hi-res files to SmugMug (provided you already up-res'd the video at Animoto and we re-rendered it as such).

SamirD wrote: »

I played with Animoto and SM for a bit, but found that there's too many technical limits and issues to use it seriously...for now.

Animoto promised they were working on development on their side, but judging from your post, it's about the same as it was when I tried it.

SamirD

Thank you Becky! I'll have to give it another shot sometime soon.