Uploading a quick video to YouTube from your laptop or mobile device is easy, but sometimes you might want to do more. Today, YouTube is making it even easier to create videos using software from XtraNormal, Stupeflix, and GoAnimate. Previously, all these sites gave you the option to export your creation to YouTube, but now you can create them directly from your YouTube account.
Available at youtube.com/create Stupeflix takes photos or videos from your personal photo collection or your Facebook account and guides you through making a sort of fancy video slideshow out of them with written text and speech-to-text voice overs. The other two services, GoAnimate and XtraNormal, are pretty similar. Both allow you to create videos with animated characters, backgrounds, music, and text-to-speech. GoAnimate also gives you the option of recording your own voice and creating custom characters with numerous options for hair color, eye color, and clothing.
According to TechCrunch, all of these services are currently running from their own servers-- instead of YouTube's-- so the movie-making is a little slow right now, though they're working on compensating for the additional load and expect to be up to full speed soon. We tried creating an XtraNormal video, but found it to be running very slow today.
If XtraNormal sounds familiar to you, it may be due to the Geico commercial that was created with the service or it could be from the below video, which is one of our favorites.
