Well, I final­ly decid­ed to give Ani­mo­to a try.

Animoto.com is a web appli­ca­tion that cre­ates MTV-style videos with the click of a but­ton.

Users sim­ply choose a song and images. Ani­mo­to then auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ates a unique video for them. No two videos are ever the same.

Many of the post-pro­duc­tion tech­niques that the founders used while work­ing as pro­duc­ers for MTV, Com­e­dy Cen­tral & ABC are used in Ani­mo­to’s patent-pend­ing Cin­e­mat­ic Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence devel­oped to think like an actu­al edi­tor and direc­tor. The result­ing video is pro­duced in a widescreen for­mat, con­tain­ing the visu­al ener­gy of a music video and the emo­tion­al impact of a movie trail­er.

Ani­mo­to Pro­duc­tions is based in New York City with an office in San Fran­cis­co.

Here’s my first tri­al run video using my BYOBW 2008 pho­to set on Flickr.

I’m dig­ging it. I only wish the free account gives you more time. Maybe when they get their social net­work going, users can vote or give props to slideshows that have “poten­tial” to be remixed even fur­ther due to the amount of images and/or how good their sound­track is. But I’ll let Ani­mo­to decide on that algo­rithm. Anoth­er thing that would be cool is the idea of using tracks from Last.fm, Pan­do­ra, or ones like it. But I’m guess­ing Ani­mo­to would need ample time to ana­lyze those tracks before­hand to inject into their mag­ic fac­to­ry.

Mean­while, the ser­vice is priced well for Per­son­al Use, $25–30/year… just like Flick­r’s. Don’t know if this is a long shot or not, but maybe incor­po­rate a deal with Flickr of get­ting a dis­count­ed mem­ber­ship. Any­ways, I can see myself pur­chas­ing a mem­ber­ship for Ani­mo­to. I fig­ure edit­ing a 3–5 minute video, and queu­ing music at the same time, takes a lot of time and patience and is well worth the $25–30. That’s only about a week’s worth of Lee’s Avo­ca­do Turkey sand­wich­es that I can pass on—not bad at all.