Product: Adobe LiveMotion 1.0
Company: Adobe
Website: http://www.adobe.com
Estimated Street Price: $299
Review By: Julien JAY

Introduction

In our connected world having a nice, animated website is very important to diffuse a professional corporate image, to increase sales and promote new products and to find potential business partners. Adobe the worldwide graphic software maker leader has perfectly understood this emerging need as they've just released brand new software named LiveMotion, which is intended to beat the supremacy of Macromedia Flash 4. LiveMotion 1.0 is an advanced software that'll allow you to draw scenes and to animate them the way you want very easily by using the same Time Editor than in Adobe AfterEffects to set your website in motion. All animations that are produced can be exported into the Macromedia Flash format that'll be recognized by 99% of the today's web-browsers!

Features list:

• Modeled after the Adobe After Effects Timeline
• Multi-object animation with independent animation of object attributes
• Auto key frame generation and auto tweening
• Support for independent looping animations
• Nondestructive authoring environment
• Library palette: Store animations for use in multiple documents
• Intuitive user interface: Based on the standard Adobe user interface
• Export options: Multiple file format export options
• Nondestructive Photoshop filter support
• 3d effects, Distortions effects, Images masks
• Seamless integration with Adobe GoLive with the following feature: Batch replace HTML elements with LiveMotion images Sound is exported to the Web standard MP3 format 1.

Setup

Installing LiveMotion is a child's game: insert the CD and wait until the setup appears. For the first time ever an Adobe product uses a Windows Installer based setup (it's still not the case for Illustrator 9 and InDesign 1.5) to bring simplicity and conviviality to your setup experience! Installing the software is a breeze and only takes 2 minutes. Once LiveMotion is installed a shortcut is created in your Windows start menu to launch it.