May 22
Adobe Releases Full Version of LiveMotion
Release follows 360,000 beta downloads

by David Nagel
Executive Producer

Adobe today released the full retail version of LiveMotion and says it plans to launch Adobe Web Collection 2.0, which will include LiveMotion 1.0, as soon as GoLive 5 and Illustrator 9 start shipping. LiveMotion is a Flash-like tool that allows developers to create interactive elements on their Web sites and includes an Adobe After Effects-inspired timeline for animation. This timeline allows users to independently animate attributes, such as position, opacity, rotation, scale, skew and color, among other elements. LiveMotionÕs timeline is object-based, not layer-based, so each attribute can be keyframed separately.

LiveMotion also includes a Styles palette that allows designers to save any combination of creative effects—including color, texture, opacity, gradients and fills, among other elements —as a style that can then be applied to other objects in a composition. It can also save motion attributes as animation and rollover styles, which can then be applied to other objects and text. Objects and text remain editable even after a style has been applied.

LiveMotion also supports native Photoshop and Illustrator formats and can preserve layers for animation. Layers can be converted into individual objects, into a group of individual objects, into a keyframe sequence or into a keyframe sequence where the bottom layer is distributed across the entire sequence. Once the layers are converted into objects or sequences, multiple attributes can be applied and independently animated. Users can even change the stacking order of multilayered Photoshop or Illustrator objects in the timeline. These graphical elements can also be edited in their native applications and updated even after being edited in LiveMotion.

LiveMotion offers output options to a wide range of graphics formats, including GIF, JPEG, PNG, Photoshop and SWF format. LiveMotion will also support the W3CÕs Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format in a future release of the product.

Adobe LiveMotion 1.0 is available now for $299. The Adobe Web Collection 2.0, containing Adobe LiveMotion 1.0, Adobe GoLive 5.0, Adobe Illustrator 9.0 and Adobe Photoshop 5.5, will be available for $999 after Illustrator 9.0 and GoLive 5.0 ship in the United States. LiveMotion requires a PowerPC processor, 64 MB RAM and 100 MB disk space. For more information, visit http://www.adobe.com.

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