CES 2009 in 1 minute on Animoto

Here’s a one-minute music video on Animoto of some photos I took at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. (And here’s the remix, which I like a bit better and shown above.)

Among those featured: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Ford Motors CEO Alan Mulally, Cathy Brooks, Maggie Fox of Social Media Club, Kiesha Cochrane, Chris Heuer of Adhocnium and Social Media Club, Sarah Austin of techku, Rohit Bhargava of Girl Gamer, the band Tripod and a pretty gal from the Sapphire nightclub.

The Animoto experience

This was the first time I’ve had a free moment to use Animoto, and I was surprised by how easy it was to create a music video. It took me less than half an hour to upload my Flickr set, select the shots I wanted to use, and select the music I wanted to incorporate into the video.

I had too many photos to pack into a 30-second clip (the service included only 8 shots in 30 seconds in the first go-round), so I plunked down $3 for a full-length video. I’ll soon pony up $30 for a one-year subscription, because I can see using this quite often.

The terrific music selection also surprised me. I’ll need to dig into this deeper to find out whether Animoto signed licensing deals with the various bands’ labels or if they’re using Creative Commons licensed music as well. In the end, there were a half-dozen indie/alt-rock tracks I liked enough to use as the soundtrack for the piece. I wound up using Adam Burns’ Master Criminal.

Brock Meeks informed me that I could remix the video by clicking the Remix button (worry not, you don’t lose the original mix), and I tried that, too, to good effect.

All in all? Animoto is perhaps the smartest, easiest-to-use mashup tool on the planet.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.