Product Reviews

With Photoshop and Illustrator, Adobe is the giant of print-orientated graphics, but Macromedia stole the Web graphics crown with its bitmap-orientated Fireworks and especially its dynamic, interactive vector-based Flash (version 5 reviewed issue 72, p208). Adobe's response was to try and offer the best of both in a single application: LiveMotion.

Not surprisingly, there was plenty for users to get to grips with in version 1 (see Reviews, issue 71, p189), especially as LiveMotion took a radical approach to object creation and formatting built on multilayered objects and non-destructive styles. Perhaps it's as well to let everything bed in, but there's little new creative power in version 2. In fact, the most obvious difference is that the previous range of Photoshop filters has been removed.

Generally, for advanced creative work, you're expected to create and edit bitmap and vector objects in Photoshop and Illustrator with the Edit Original command (assuming you own the apps, of course). You can also simply drag Photoshop PSD and Illustrator AI files (including effects and transparency) into your LiveMotion composition. Multilayered files can be converted to individual objects, groups or sequences, and manipulated in LiveMotion with any changes automatically updated.

LiveMotion's integration with GoLive (see p144) has been improved. Using the Web palette you can mark objects as variables, and GoLive will detect these replacement tags to enable automated graphics production, animation building and file updates. You can change both text and styles directly from within GoLive, which will launch LiveMotion and generate the new SWF file. You can also automatically update all the SWF files on a site. It's impressive, but it comes at a cost - version 1's Batch Replace command for turning HTML tags into formatted graphics has been dropped.

The name LiveMotion comes from its ability to bring compositions to life as animations; these are then output as QuickTime movies, animated GIFs and, most importantly, Flash SWFs. LiveMotion 2 copies

Another welcome import from After Effects is the ability to time-stretch an effect or the entire animation. You can also take more control of the animation process by temporarily locking or hiding objects in the Composition window or the Timeline and calling up the most common animatable properties with single-key shortcuts.

The improvements to LiveMotion's animation capabilities are welcome, but the biggest change is the introduction of scripting. Using the JavaScript-based Script Editor, you can create automation scripts to take care of repetitive or complex tasks complete with loops, mathematical functions and conditional logic. It offers colour coding, auto-indent, syntax checking, find and replace, a DOM browser and an advanced debugging environment. It's serious power, but it's seriously intimidating. Thankfully, the average user can still benefit from presupplied scripts.

Control over LiveMotion through Automation Scripting is only half the story; Player Scripting lets you control the Flash player during animation run-time. Using the DOM browser in the Script Editor, you can access all the power of Macromedia's ActionScript language to give your compositions real intelligent interactivity. You can use LiveMotion 2 to create anything from an online game to a chat room to an XML-based e-commerce site.

Well, that's the theory. I'm less convinced. The new power comes at the cost of complexity, as the most commonly used actions are no longer available as simple-to-add Behaviours. I'm also unconvinced that advanced users will actually use LiveMotion to create the Web applications that Adobe claims, as LiveMotion's programming environment is less friendly and less powerful than Flash's.

Many users were expecting LiveMotion to introduce SVG support. After all, Adobe claims SVG is the Web graphics technology of the future. But targetting Macromedia's Flash SWF technology means that Adobe has spent the majority of its LiveMotion effort in a largely vain attempt to compete with Flash in the high-end field of Web application development rather than concentrate on the program's real strength: producing the creative graphical elements for high-impact Web and multimedia design.