Animoto is a neat little website that takes the power of Amazon’s EC2 distributed computing services and applies it to a fun and innovative little application. We’ve all seen slide shows, and one of my former employers made a fair bit of money doing these for customers.
Basically, you take a music track (or multiple music tracks) and time it to go with a bunch of stills. Meshing the stills with the transitions and the soundtrack is often the most difficult part of this. Animoto makes this pretty simple to do. Just upload an mp3 track and point it at your flickr account or upload you stills. It takes all of these pieces, analyzes the music, and spits out an H.264-encoded clip suitable for download or sharing on YouTube. Incredibly cool, and I know that this is actually a hard problem for computers to solve.
I generated that with about 5 minutes of effort. I love to see little webapps that make the complex seem easy, while simultaneously sweating the details of UI.
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