By some fluke of nature your video has exploded

Animoto, content creation system, is a nice idea if only it worked better

Web Applications Alert By Mark Gibbs, Network World
June 18, 2008 12:06 AM ET

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

One of the greatest forces in the Web 2.0 world has been the rise of user generated online content. From opinion blogs, through true citizen journalism, to music and videos there’s been an explosion of user creativity that has changed the media landscape forever. To support this content surge a whole flotilla of Web services have appeared to present, index, search, and create content.

My focus today is a content creation system that produces very good video presentations with very little effort - in other words and in theory even the least media skilled user can put together a presentation that looks almost professional without breaking a sweat.

The service is Animoto, which was launched last August (could it be in beta? Yep).

After registration (currently free) Animoto will take a user’s photos and music (either uploaded by the user or from the Animoto library) and create movie magic. The demo movies are excellent, but the end results I achieved or rather didn’t achieve, were to put it mildly, disappointing.

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The Animoto user interface is very polished with a straightforward organization and a good amount of chrome making the experience feel polished and professional except when it stupidly and naively doesn’t bother to tell you that it has image size limits.

I tried to uploaded 43 images and Animoto went through the whole palaver of uploading them only to report at the very end of the process that the maximum file size allowed is 512KB.

Did they tell me this before I started? Nope. Sure, if I’d bothered to read the content in the “Tips for this section” link I would have known, but if you’re designing for the majority of users you should assume they’ll just want to try out the service and read as little as possible.

Allow me to digress for a moment and ponder the question of how much did these people test their service in the real world? It shouldn’t have taken many users to discover the problem with not telling them up front that there’s a file size limitation.

Now some of you might be thinking that if I had bothered to read the “tips” I would not have been disappointed, but isn’t Animoto’s goal to try to get as many people as possible to love their service? Expecting users to read something called “tips” – something that most would consider to be non-critical information – is optimistic to say the least.

Despite the error, Animoto claimed that it had accepted 24 of my images so I went on to make a presentation out of them. This is quite a long process as the service has to render your uploaded images and your selected music and create a video.

When done you can remix your creation; e-mail it to friends; get embedded code so you can use it in your Web site; download the video (only available for paid for, full-length videos), send it to YouTube, upgrade your service to DVD quality and; (as yet unreleased) create iPod compatible video. To create a “full-length” video you have to pay $3 for a single video or $30 per year for unlimited use.

So back to my video. After 20 minutes of messing around Animoto produced the highly disappointing report, “Your video has exploded. / No but seriously, by some fluke of nature your video has caused an error in our system!”

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.