Joel Spolsky had a blog entry about Animoto for making slideshows. I need that very thing next week for Boy Scouts so I had a look. Wow, I'm very impressed.

Here's the result:

In all, it took me a couple of hours to put this together. Animoto connected right to the Picasa stream of our troop's photos (it can also connect to Facebook, Flickr, and others, or upload manually). The most time consuming part of the process was going through the photo sets and deleting the pictures I didn't want.

After I had the photos in the order I wanted I chose some background music and let it process. It came out fantastic. It is a nice blend of transitions between photos that doesn't reuse the same transition too much and also doesn't make me nauseous.

30 second movies are free and it is only $3 for a full length movie. Well worth it! I also paid an extra $5 to download a DVD quality version. Again, well worth it.

Highly recommended!