Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

My first thought was "Hey, I can already create simple collages in Picasa, and complex ones in FotoFusion, so why would I use this?". After taking it for a spin though, I see that they have a bunch of cool templates, so this is something a little different. With output resolutions being limited to 1.9 megapixels (1600 x 1200) you're not going to be making collages appropriate for printing, but for sharing on Facebook and Twitter? Pretty much perfect. It's free, so check it out!

Former Windows Phone Thoughts editor Jonathon Watkins, now a full-time professional photographer in the UK, attended the SWPP (Society of Wedding & Portrait Photographers) conference in London a few days ago and had a chat with folks at the Animoto stand. He mentioned he was hoping for the service to upgrade to HD and was surprised when he was told that would happen on the 25th of January. The service will be 720p and initially only the Animoto Original video style will be HD enabled. The Pro styles will be upgraded next followed by all the other styles in due course. Animoto have also tweaked their server farm so the renders will now run 10x faster. There is no plan to charge extra for the service according to Watkins.

I've written about Animoto before, and way back in 2008 I was scratching my head over how they could possibly charge $5 for a standard definition video and offer no HD options at all. Now, almost three years later, they're finally offering HD video, and their pricing is $5/month or $30/year - but the video only 720p. That's good, but why not 1080p? Will they offer 1080p when we're all using quad HD TV sets? I've never signed up for an Animoto account because without HD output, there's no point, and while 720p is dramatically better than 480p, I'm still puzzled by Animoto's refusal to offer 1080p video to people who are paying for their service. This does mean, however, that Animoto will have something that ProShow Web doesn't offer for $30/month...HD video output. I was disappointed when Photodex launched ProShow Web with the same SD video limitation that Animoto has rather than one-upping them and having a real advantage to using their service. Worth noting is that ProShow Web's professional-grade service ($150/year) offers 1080p output.

I personally think most people would be better off spending $69.95 once and buy Photodex's ProShow Gold - you can output to 1080p that way, and have great control over your projects. And with the new project wizard, you can get amazing results in just a few clicks.

I'm a big fan of ProShow from Photodex, and they're making that very powerful program available as a Web service of some sort; it will be subscription-based, and while there's no detail on pricing, I'd hope it would be competitive with services such as Animoto. Actually, I hope they do better, because while I don't mind Animoto's $30/year personal account fee, I do mind that the videos are DVD resolution - I mean, what's the point of that? If ProShow on the Web outputs 1080p videos and is cost-effective for people to use, it could be a real winner.

"BeFunky Photo Effects allow everyday people to easily create photographically rich and artistic results from their digital images without the need for any technical knowledge. These "one-click" photo effect options produce desired results effortlessly and each effect comes with the option to make simple adjustments."

I played around with this a little today, and it's pretty neat - many of the effects, such as the one above, are a notch above the cheeseball effects you get with your typical photo editor. If you want to jazz up a photo, check out BeFunky!