We are huge fans of Animoto, the very straightforward mash-up tool that lets you take images, put them to music, and turn them into incredible video slideshows that simply draw the eye.

Now the image remixing platform is opening its doors to a new kind of media that takes Animoto videos to the next level: video clips.

That’s right: your Animoto videos can now include short video clips that expand the Animoto experience in a completely new direction. The result is something to behold.

Here’s How Animoto Video Clips Works

The new Animoto feature utilizes what the company calls “Cinematic Artificial Intelligence” technology to analyze video clips and weave them together with images you upload to create Animoto videos that are eye-popping while synced to musical clips that have been central to the Animoto experience.

It works like this: you can upload videos, up to 200 MB in size, from your computer, Flip, iPhone 3G S, and other media. You can then pick out short clips from these videos – up 5 seconds for standard, 10 seconds for premium videos – and place them into your animation, just like before. You can even control the sound. You can choose either to keep the music playing and mute the audio (default) or to activate the clip’s audio and take the music volume down by half.

There’s always been a lot of appeal to Animoto videos, and they just became a lot more versatile and useful. Animoto’s even partnered with iStockphotoiStockphoto

to provide about 200 stock videos for users to use in their animations.

Animoto videos have always spoken for themselves, and the video clip feature always seemed like a natural evolution for the platform. That doesn’t take away from the coolness factor, though. And to demonstrate that have a look at these examples: ANIMOTO