|
|
|
|
||
        |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
A Natural Reaction There's a certain element in society that becomes antsy when hearing the word "Adobe". Their nostrils flair. They feel warm and tingly all over. Mention a new product announcement from Adobe and they become visibly agitated. They pace like expectant fathers in the delivery ward. They shake. They sweat. It's downright freaky. I confess; I'm one of them. I use other products - lots of other products. I spend perfectly good money to buy other manufacturer's graphics software. I like a lot of them too. But, there's something about Adobe software that's like going home. Upon word that Adobe was releasing a new application named LiveMotion, I performed the ritualistic twitching, shaking and sweating. Live Motion is an object-oriented, vector-based authoring environment that even the most rookie designer can operate to produce compelling web animation. From the Adobe LiveMotion native file format (.liv) you can export you work in a variety of formats - gif, jpeg, psd, png, or swf (the Shockwave format files you read with the Flash plug-in from Macromedia).
Familiar Features
Action!
You specify how an object will get from point A to point B, and any other point in between. Objects can move straight, in a spiral, bouncing up and down, or whatever path you might choose. Simply create a "keyframe" and position an object, specify the amount of time for the animated effect, then change the object. LiveMotion will automatically insert the end keyframe and tween the effect between the start and end keyframes. (Tweening is creating the in-between state images.) Voila! It could hardly be any simpler. In addition to the position of an object, you can easily select the opacity, rotation, skew and scale. By varying these settings at different keyframes you can create dazzling interactive animations with spectacular effects. Any subsequent edits to the object at different points in time will automatically insert new keyframes at those points in time. These keyframes can be changed, repositioned or deleted at any time with ease.
A Plethora of Visual Effects Create partially transparent graphics, overlay transparent vector objects on bitmaps, and vary the levels of opacity, transparent colors, gradients, and other attributes at any time for very impressive effects. You can apply a variety of effects to objects or images without ever having to leave the LiveMotion application. Designers can alter their creations using Pathfinder operations (unite, intersect, exclude, etc.), 3D effects (bevel, emboss, shadows, cutouts, etc.), Opacity, Textures, Object Masks, Photoshop Filter Effects (to bitmapped images), Gradients, Image Adjustments (brightness, contrast, tints, etc.), and Distortions (displace, twirl, spherize, magnify, pixelate, etc.) - all of which are object oriented, non destructive and editable at any time.
Even More Features!
Also, LiveMotion gives designers flexibility in output options, including the ability to divide the composition into an HTML table where each cell contains a different format, static or animated, complete with JavaScript interactivity. Speaking of JavaScript, creating sophisticated rollover effects is profoundly simply using this software. It creates the images and the html, you just copy and paste into the proper place using your favorite html editing software.
To Top Off Your Home Studio...
I found the Live Preview function to be especially helpful. When done with your masterpiece, you can see how optimization settings will effect the final output right in the LiveMotion composition window. In addition, you can test the interactive elements of their composition without having to generate an external preview file. This makes LiveMotion a valuable prototyping tool for easily mocking-up Web sites without writing any code, and enables real-time debugging of compositions authored with LiveMotion. Previewing your masterpiece in various Web browsers is equally as easy with the "Preview In" command, which lets you select any browser you have available to view the work.
The Down Side Unfortunately, I encountered some difficulties in exporting my creation in any format other than .swf, which is only viewable using the Flash plug-in for your web browser. This was very discouraging, though I was able, without fail, to export the work in beautiful .swf images. Strangely, while saving as .gif, I found I'd lose the background color, yet while saving as .jpg I'd lose the text and have the background color intact. Sometimes an object would float slightly beyond its last fixed position when playing back the animation. Not much, just enough so the creator would know. I encountered a frustrating number of glitches in LiveMotion. For example, on occasion I was unable to select a new color from the color palette unless I relaunched the application. And on several occasions, the undo command didn't undo the last action taken. Also, I noticed several times when experimenting by applying one style after another, after three different styles or so, the object would just vanish. Adobe's way of penalizing my indecisiveness?
Final Take Last, here are a few examples of what can be done with just a little bit of time invested in Livemotion (these links require the Shockwave plugin): The CoXFiles Animation and the Alien Animation. These impressive results are shadowed by the instability of LiveMotion. These unexpected, strange flaws are very unlike Adobe. Well, except for the reputation that InDesign got when it first came out, when Adobe quickly fixed several design bugs with version 1.5, but then tried to gouge their customers with a huge upgrade tab. Let's hope Adobe has learned their lesson and fixes the glitches in LiveMotion in short order - without trying to fleece their loyal customers. For its debut version (a demo is available here), LiveMotion has earned a 3 out of 5 rating. This is a feature rich, very user friendly design tool that is unfortunately suffering from a number of problems typical of first releases. We expect Adobe to swiftly rectify these defects, at which time, it will be worthy of a higher rating.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Title: LiveMotion
The
Adobe AfterEffects-based animation timeline offers a fairly simple means
to design very complex animations. The object oriented method of creating
animations ensures that with just a wee bit of poking around, anyone can
turn out attractive and interesting animation.
LiveMotion
allows you to select any combination of creative effects - including textures,
opacity, gradients, fills, animation, sound, and interactivity - and save
them as a "Style" to be applied to other objects. This makes it easy to
maintain consistency throughout your work. And you can copy a style and
paste it onto other objects.
LiveMotion
imports the major sound formats, including wav, snd, aiff, au, and MP3.
Designers can incorporate a background soundtrack, link sounds to specific
events in their animation, or cause sounds to play at specific user interactions.
Multiple audio tracks can be used, and designers can take advantage of
controls like panning (left/right), volume, fade-in, fade-out, etc. And
LiveMotion includes 50 royalty-free sound files.
