Review: Adobe LiveMotion 1.0

REVIEW • August 2, 2000
Adobe LiveMotion 1.0
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It's safe to assume that not all Photoshop filters will work in a vector program like LiveMotion. But, so far, all of mine do work, and I have a pretty extensive selection dating way back, including KPT, Alien Skin and Extensis plugins.

As I mentioned above, though, plugins can't be animated. Given that virtually anything anyone would want to do in LiveMotion will be animated, this is a pretty severe limitation. An object brought into LiveMotion either has a filter applied to it, or it doesn't. There's no transitioning in a filtered effect, and a filtered effects can't be adjusted over time. How nice would it be, for example, to be able to corrode an image over time using Paint Alchemy? Or distort an image over time with KPT Goo? Or transition an image with an expanding border from Extensis Photoframe?

Also as mentioned above, you can't use After Effects plugins. The message here is clear: LiveMotion is not an alternative to After Effects for Web animation. What's more, if you want to animate an effect in After Effects and bring it into LiveMotion as an image sequence, you're stuck with formats that don't have good support for alpha channels, so you really can't use an image sequence as an overlay.

The final limitation to using Photoshop filters is that you can't apply them to objects created in LiveMotion, such as type or simple polygons. (Built-in effects, such as distortion, can be applied to any object.) Still, the support for plugins in LiveMotion is the best thing we have right now for interactive Web animation.

Animation
The timeline is where LiveMotion proves itself a formidable animation application. Those of you familiar with After Effects will instantly see the similarities. Those of you who aren't familiar with it will adapt quickly.

Look familiar? LiveMotion's timeline looks and acts like the timeline in Adobe After Effects.

Animating objects in LiveMotion is simple. It can be accomplished in two ways. First, by using the timeline, users can simply click on an object, select the characteristic to animate, move the timeline forward and make whatever change to the object that's required. For example, if you want an object to float around, you just click the object, select the Position characteristic, move the timeline forward and then manually drag the object to its final position. Multiple keyframes can be automatically entered just by dragging the object at various points in the timeline.