The New Animoto Makes Creating And Editing Video Slideshows A Breeze

Animoto, a website that lets you easily create photo and video slideshows matched to music, is debuting a brand new, smarter, easier video creation flow that makes using service even simpler.

For background, Animoto basically allows you to take your images, video and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. Not only is the platform easy to use, but it also renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects.

The creation of a video slideshow used to take a minimum of 12 clicks and with the new update now only takes five clicks. Co-founder and CEO Brad Jefferson tells me that editing video is too time-consuming and not enjoyable for most people, but seeing your photos and/or video clips in a professional-looking video is fun. Basically, with the new version of Animato, users can focus on quickly and painlessly creating video slideshows.

The startup also says that the creation flow has been tweaked to fit up 300 media tiles on a screen, to cater to some of the consumer and professional power users of Animoto who use dozens of photos and/or video clips to create long video slideshows. The old creation flow only showed 30 media tiles on the screen at one time, but with hundreds of tiles in one screen, developing these longer slideshows is simpler.

The ability to search for music from Animoto’s library of hundreds of tracks is now easier and faster as you can now sort by title, artist, and song length. The company also added a new video slideshow style to its library, called Vintage Voyage, which lets anyone produce videos with an antique, old-world feel.

Jefferson says that the Animoto team re-built the creation flow from the ground up, and sees this as one of the most significant product updates to the platform in the past year. Animoto just raised $25 million in new funding, now has 3.3 million users, and is seeing 100,000 paying subscribers across its five subscription types.

He says that we can expect more product updates and innovations around Animoto soon. And the company has doubled its team size since January, from 34 to over 70 employees. Stay tuned for more news from the video creation startup.