Animoto doubles video sizes, burns your memories onto plastic
You've got to love Web kitsch. The YouTube tube socks probably still take the cake in my mind, but slide show creation tool Animoto's latest offering isn't too shabby either.
Twenty dollars gets your rave-worthy slide shows burned onto DVDs and sent to friends and family members. To go hand in hand with that, the service has also bolstered resolutions two-fold, bumping up the respectable 432x240 videos to 864x480 while simultaneously increasing the frame rate from 15 to 24 fps--the same as a movie projector.
The larger sizes come at a price though. The extra resolutions cost an extra $5, but can be applied to previously created shows. That extra resolution is most noticeable on big-screen TVs and computer displays. The company is making these larger videos available in one of two formats--an ISO file that can be burned straight to DVDs to be playable in set-top boxes (using a program like Nero), as well as a QuickTime MOV file that can be squirreled away on your hard drive or sent to friends using large file transfer and hosting services.
The folks at Animoto have put together a really useful head-to-head demo here, where you can see the standard versus premium videos right next to one another. Below is a still capture from the same shot.
Related: YouTube sucks: 4 sites that do video better
Five bucks makes your videos about twice as sharp as before, which is useful for big-screen TVs and wide-screen computer monitors.
(Credit: Animoto Productions)
Josh Lowensohn is an associate editor for Webware.com, CNET's blog about cool and otherwise useful Web applications and services. If you've found a site you'd like profiled, shoot him an e-mail. E-mail Josh.
