* Animoto, content creation system, is a nice idea if only it worked better
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 with Animoto.
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.
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!”
Oh really, “but seriously”? “Some fluke of nature”? Yeah, I’d say it was pretty serious because you just let me down. And a “fluke of nature”? Sure, but only if your programmers are flukes of nature.
You want my enthusiasm and commitment and what you’ve just told me is that you’ve failed me and you think it is kind of amusing. Someone isn’t thinking clearly here about marketing and customer perception.
Animoto’s error message continued: “We’re very sorry about the inconvenience. Rest assured that we know about the issue and are actively tackling it. / Often, this is due to corrupt/funky media files that our system isn’t used to. If you know why it may have happened, let us know with the “Got feedback?” link in the corner. / Otherwise, we’ll send you an e-mail as soon as it’s gone through successfully, at which point come on back and refresh this page. Sorry about that!”
You’re sorry! Oh, good.
Like I said, the demos are great and I will probably try to get something out of the system when I get a chance, but for now I have better things to do. Like go and watch a movie. One that I didn’t have to waste my effort trying to create.
UPDATE: Twelve hours later I got an e-mail telling me that my video was finished! And sure enough, one was waiting for me and it was pretty good.
I also got a follow-up message from Animoto Tech support suggesting that the problem could be with the music I had uploaded. As I had used their music rather than uploading a track the diagnosis was completely unhelpful and unimpressive. I suspect that the problem was more to do with the fact I uploaded more images or a larger size than they actually can handle.
I’ve tried their remix feature, which allows you to generate variations on your movie using different pictures and music and the results were good.
