A little Something Special for Valentine's Day

Okay, so chocolates are fattening, flowers die and cards are crazy expensive, but you want to do something special for Valentine’s Day. What to do? Well, dig out your family photos and try this! The little video I am sharing here is one I made for my husband for our fourteenth wedding anniversary. I have converted all of our pictures to digital; from our wedding and onward, so I had a good selection to choose from. It would also have worked well as a Valentine video.

I have been experimenting with an online app from a company called Animoto. It is a nifty little site where you can upload your photos and video clips, and create short little video slideshows with both music and animation. It is a paid service, for both individual usage, as well as business. The personal usage charge is modest, and professional level, a little more pricey. Now you don’t necessarily have to pay to make a slideshow; all Apple computers have a great slideshow export in their photos program, and I suspect most PC’s can do this as well. This does all the hardwork of formatting for the appropriate platform, without having to learn what that means. I often make photo books, but this is way cheaper and I can make as many as I want for no further cost, beyond the membership level I choose to sign up for and, downloaded copies are mine to do with as I wish and are available at no additional charge!

What impresses me about Animoto in addition to its user friendly simplicity, is that the videos can be downloaded as a HD standalones to be shared on your big screen tv, lower res for phones and medium for things like Facebook. If you have an iPhone or iPad you are often left out of the loop on these little videos because they are Flash driven. These little video creations are IOS friendly and play beautifully on iPads and iPhones. You don’t have to worry about things like music rights, as they have a library of music backgrounds suitable for just about any occasion. I have tried to play videos I have created with royalty free music on Facebook, and for whatever reason, I get warned that I am somehow infringing on someone’s digital rights, in spite of only using royalty free music, and acknowledging permission. So frustrating!! I don’t have this problem with Animoto. I usually export mine to my free Vimeo account, because I am not sure I want to pay for this indefinitely, but it is working well for me now.

How fun it would be to pop one of these slideshows on a jump drive, wrapped in a pretty package and send out to grandparents for Valentines Day, or anybody else who would love to have family pictures sent in such a unique and accessible way.

You can check it out here: https://animoto.com/