Video and photo slideshow creator Animoto is celebrating its fifth birthday today and to mark the occasion, the company has announced that it has surpassed six million registered users and 30 million created videos.
That alone should be plenty of reason for the firm to celebrate, however the Animoto team has also revealed today that it has secured US Patent number 8,347,213 for its “Cinematic Technology” and released a brand new video editing style, entitled “I Love NY”, which it claims is “its most cinematically advanced video style to date”.
The “Cinematic Technology” which the new patent refers to is essentially the process at the core of Animoto. Once you’ve chosen all of the necessary content, as well as a video style created by Animoto, the website or app does all the heavy lifting for you, ordering the clips and editing them down so that it matches the music and/or your voice perfectly.
The result is a high quality edit or slideshow which shows all of your work in mere minutes.
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“Throughout our five years, we’ve maintained the same vision—to inspire people to share their lives using the magic of video,” said Brad Jefferson , CEO and co-founder of Animoto. “We deeply believe that video is magical when done right, and we’re proud of our pioneering role in democratizing the ability to create great-looking video.”
A demo of the new “I Love NY” video style is available from the company’s website, and shows user content edited on top of recogniseable New York settings, such as the side of a building, billboard or taxi roof advertisement. It looks pretty impressive, and is likely to be a hit with anyone who has ever travelled there. Interestingly, the video is also one of the first times we’ve seen the company’s new branding, which ditches the sharp cornered “a” character for a much subtler series of overlaying triangles.
You can read a bit more about it in a short post published by Jefferson on the Animoto blog earlier today.
In November last year, we reported on the introduction of “Best in 2012”, a new feature from Animoto that allowed users to reflect on eveything they’ve done over the last 12 months. By signing in with your Facebook account, the service essentially took your top moments, determined by the social network’s Open Graph, and spliced it together into a minute-long video.
Founded in 2006, Animoto is based in New York City, and also has an office in San Francisco. Users can download the company’s app to either an Android or iOS device, or try the free version of the service online. If you want to produce anything longer than 30 seconds though, you will need to sign up to one of Animoto’s price plans, which start at $2.50 per month, or $30 for the year.
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