Wedding Slideshow - DONE thanks to Animoto

I've been dragging my feet in putting together our slideshow for the wedding. I'd been hitting a wall trying to edit over 100 images in PowerPoint and MovieMaker on my PC when I found Animoto. I can't believe I hadn't heard of it any sooner. It's a kick-ass automatic movie maker. You can sync it with your Flickr, Facebook and other social networking sites to pull your image files and video into Animoto. You don't have to be an editing whiz -- the site automatically sets your images and video to the pace and tempo of the song you pick.

You can choose your own song, but you don't have control over the number of songs. I love love love the final result.

I'm not posting the video since I don't want our guests to see it before October 10! But I did put together a quick video of my dog to show you what one of the slideshows can look like (it's the 30 second version, you have a choice of full length/as long as the song you choose).

Here are some comments on using Animoto:

1) It took me 6 hours to put this together!
2) Scan your photos at hi-res -- I made the mistake of importing low res and had to rescan everything (which is a huge reason it took 6 hours).
3) Don't panic when you can't see the final result before processing. Simply put your photos in the order you want them to appear, upload your song and let Animoto do the rest. I was amazed with how our images synced with the song we ultimately chose.
4) The original Animoto production template is by far the coolest one, the Air, Water, Fire, and Earth aren't as flashy.
5) Definitely upgrade to the $30/year membership so that you can save your work and also access more than one template.
6) Don't freak out when you watch your video on full screen and everything is blurry, Animoto charges you $5 to upgrade to hi-res to be able to watch it on larger monitors.
7) Stumped with music? Our friend, Juaquin, tipped us off to a great site, called Dirpy, where you can find songs on Youtube and convert them to mp3 (esp. if your music collection is tied up in iTunes).
8) Have fun!