Adobe Systems Inc. Monday unveiled Adobe
LiveMotion software, which is designed to incorporate motion, sound and interactivity in an
object-oriented, vector-based authoring environment.
LiveMotion exports to a wide range of graphics formats including, GIF, JPEG, PNG, Adobe
Photoshop, and Flash(.swf) format. LiveMotion will also support the W3C’s
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format in the next release of the product.
The product is integrated with Adobe’s Web authoring
tools — GoLive, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator. This decreases the learning curve and enables designers and developers to
move into a productive and efficient workflow right from the start, the company said.
“In today’s e-commerce driven Internet, competition for attention is fierce.
Designers are finding it necessary to incorporate animation, interactivity,
high-quality sound and video, and other technological advancements to make
their Web sites stand out in the crowd,” said Hank Skorny, senior director of
Adobe’s Internet Products Group. “LiveMotion provides Web professionals with
a streamlined production workflow for creating and delivering visually
engaging content that will increase customer reach and retention.”
Adobe LiveMotion contains its own set of content creation tools that allow
designers to create effects without having to use an additional outside
application. LiveMotion provides vector-based drawing and shape tools that
borrow from Photoshop and Illustrator. Also, any
combination of creative effects can be saved as a Style and then applied to
other objects.
Live Motion uses the Adobe graphics engine to provide support for both the
native Photoshop and Illustrator file formats. Imported content can be
enhanced and animated using a wide variety of design features. Designers can
place native Photoshop and Illustrator files directly into LiveMotion or open
layered Photoshop and Illustrator files as keyframe sequences, composite
objects, or as a series of independent objects. Designers no longer are
forced to give up the flexibility of layers as they are by other Flash (.swf)
authoring environments that require layered files to be flattened and
converted into a composite file format before being able to work with them.
Echoing the After Effects Timeline, the LiveMotion Timeline is object-based,
and not layer-based. Designers
can edit animated or static attributes at any time in the editing process, so
they do not need to start over if they change their mind.
Adobe LiveMotion is currently available as public beta for Macintosh and
Windows, including Windows 2000 on the Adobe Web site. Adobe LiveMotion is expected to
be available in Q2, and is expected to have an estimated street price of
$399 in the United States only.
