Adobe's LiveMotion is a new program designed to create exciting interactive web pages utilizing sound and other effects that can integrate with Adobe's other programs such as GoLive, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

The requirements on the window's side are: A Pentium II or faster processor, Microsoft Windows 98, Windows NT with Service Pack 4, or Windows 2000, 48 MB of Ram (64 MB recommended), 100 MB of available hard-disk space, and a CD-Rom drive.

LiveMotion normally retails for $299. There is a trial 30 day version on the Adobe Website of http://www.adobe.com For a limited time Adobe is offering a summer special of $99.00 with a purchase or upgrade of Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe Illustrator 9.0 or Adobe GoLive 4.0 or 5.0. This information can be found at http://www.adobe.com/store/products/lmsummer.html

LiveMotion (LM) is an object based program where each object can be manipulated independent of any others. It can be used on its own to create objects to animate or can be integrated with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. As can be done in Illustrator 9, objects can be edited non-destructively, ie.; without needing to recreate them. Vector shapes can be created and manipulated through tools and operations such as the Pen Tool for changing anchor points, Pathfinder for showing how two objects can be brought together (unite, exclude etc.), adjustments such as brightness, distortion, Photoshop filter effects, etc.

Native Illustrator and Photoshop files can be brought into LM as can layered Photoshop and Illustrator files. These latter can be opened as keyframe sequences, composite objects or as a series of independent objects.

The transparency and opacity of abjects can be specified.

LM uses an Animation Timeline, Auto Keyframing, and Auto Tweening. Motion Paths can be changed; ie., objects can move in a straight path, a spital, bounce up and down, etc. The opacity of an object can be set at 100%, for example, and then changed to 0%. Auto Bezier is the default setting. For example Hold Keyframecoupled with Linear makes the transition abrupt.

LM can output to many formats including static formats such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, or SVG or animated formats such as Flash (swf) or animated GIF. The compression settings can be adjusted for each object when exporting to Flash format, or the composition can be treated as a whole. Sounds can be easily controlled although I did not experiement with this aspect of the program. Along with LiveMotion on the CD-Rom is included QuickTime 4.

Styles can be controlled in a few ways. It is very easy to drag an object to the Styles palette, thereby capturing particular effects. it is, then, very easy to drag a style to apply it to another object. Color schemes from a Color Scheme Genereator can be used for consistency. By using HTML tags, websites can be changed easily through mass substitution of elements.

For more indepth reading material, I suggest users access the product information sheets on the Adobe website as well as techguides on the same site. http://www.adobe.com/products/livemotion/main.html

As mentioned earlier in this review, native Photoshop and Illustrator files can be placed in live motion. However, pure Illustrator 9 files cannot be opened in LiveMotion. The message will read " Unable to read that EPS file." That is because Adobe has adopted the PDF format for Illustrator 9 native files. In order to place Illustrator 9 files, they must be saved as Illustrator 8 compatible which can result in losing any information the Illustrator 9 file might have that cannot be found in Illustrator 8 or in bringing the file back into Illustrator 9 at a future date. When saving it as an Illustrator 8 compatible file, the message reads. "You are saving this document in Adobe Illustrator 8 format. Saving this document in an older format may disable some editing features when the document is read back in." [to Illustrator 9].

In all probability, this should not be a problem to the majority of users. The same situation holds true if the object is saved in .eps format. It must be compatible with Illustrator 8 which means possible loss of information. Certain concepts have to be relearnt in LiveMotion because LM is an object oriented program. One object can have many layers each containg a different attribute. For those of us who use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, we are used to a layer oriented program where many objects can be on a layer. Soon after working with LM, this new orientation became second nature.

The ease of learning a program from tutorials or manuals is an area that I like to explore especially when I am not familiar with a program. (It is hard to judge the learning curve of a new version of a familiar program.) I printed out all of the training pdf's from the "Training Folder" in LM. Some were very clear and easy to follow; while others were not. If I had to guess, I would speculate that they were not all written by the same person. However, I was able to follow all of them. Depending on level of experience working with animation and bitmap and vector images, completion of the tutorial is an excellent investment of time. After going through most of the tutorials, the basic concepts in LM became very clear and the program began to be easy to use. I, also found more tutroials on a site called "Flash Killer" Its URL is: http://www.flashkiller.com

I envisioned how I wanted my first animation created in this program to look and was able to accomplish it in a relatively short time. I was never very excited about creating animations because I could never make them small enough to download easily. Now I am very excited about creating more.

While working in LiveMotion, I found that I kept open essentially three palettes although I did, of course, use more. The Opacity palette and the Transformation palette were always open.

The timeline is the core of LiveMotion. Multiple aspects of each object are controlled in this section of the program. Behaviors can also be added from the Timeline.

My ideas are coming so fast that I want to finish this review so I can embark on new projects in LiveMotion, especially utilizing the flash SWF format. As stated earlier, files can be exported using different techniques and file formats. The SWF format was by far the cleanest and fastest giving smaller files with faster download times. Also gradient fills were smoother using SWF than using GIF animation. One needs a reader to read Flash and Shockwave files. These are free and available on a number of sites. The following is one of them: http://sdc.shockwave.com/shockwave/download/

I highly recommend this product and suggest readers be on the lookout for more images along with tutorials. Also, in the fall or winter, I will give a demonstration of LiveMotion at one of the Tulsa Computer Society meetings and show how easy it is to create fast and clean animations.

For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here