I've been experimenting with GoAnimate as a way to make video animations.
"Biographies of Living People" is the first in a series of videos about Wikipedia and Wikiversity.
GoAnimate uses Flash and like many video "applications" it is a hardware beast: I suggest using the latest version of Flash, a fast processor and plenty of memory. GoAnimate runs on "the cloud" and was off-line for a day recently when the cloud dried up.
After playing around with the free version of GoAnimate for a week, I got an email offer of a one month trial account for GoPlus. The trial GoPlus account allows you to get around their restriction on access to the GoAnimate voice-to-text feature. Also the trial GoPlus account gave me the ability to make a video that was longer than 2 minutes. This one is my longest, so far. In my experience, when a video starts getting to about 2 minutes and it has a large number of elements, then the whole GoAnimate video editing interface can start to slow down. I've had several crashes and once I lost about 20 minutes of video editing when I got a message saying that the save function had failed.
The best thing about the one month trial account for GoPlus is that it allows for converting your GoAnimate videos to Youtube videos. The second best "feature" is the ability to mix together characters from different GoAnimate character sets ("channels"). For example, when starting a video in the Star Trek channel you also get access to some characters from 11 other "channels". The third best thing about the one month trial account for GoPlus is that it allows for image uploads.
