Taking the measure of LiveMotion

After releasing InDesign, Adobe's challenger to Quark Inc.'s market-leading XPress page-layout package, the company is preparing to take on Macromedia Inc.'s Flash with LiveMotion, a Web animation package that Adobe released as a public beta at February's Seybold Seminars Boston conference.

For the past few years the San Jose, Calif., software giant has been playing catch-up when it comes to Web publishing. LiveMotion not only adds a Web-animation tool to Adobe's (adbe) arsenal but is the first product on the market besides Flash that can export to Flash's .swf format. Besides creating vector animations, LiveMotion can also export pixel-based frame-by-frame animations as well as compress and export a number of other popular Web formats such as JPEG, PNG and GIF. But is this distinction enough to give LiveMotion an advantage over Macromedia's (macr) well-established Flash software?

It's not a Flash-killer yet, said Craig Drake, an independent Flash designer based in San Francisco and a member of Adobe's LiveMotion beta-testing program. "Right now a lot of people are comparing it to Flash, and you can't help but compare it to Flash because it does a lot of the same things that Flash does," he said. "It has vector animation, but it is also really good at handling pixel-based stuff."

Drake said he sees room for co-existence between the products: LiveMotion handles pixel-based animation better than vector-based graphics, and Flash has the opposite strengths.

Kelly Goto, creative director of Idea Integration in San Francisco, said she also believes the two products will emerge as healthy competitors. "Flash is heavily vector-based, and LiveMotion can be conceived as a pixel bit-map tool."

In the long run, however, Drake said, LiveMotion features that resemble Adobe's After Effects video-effects package may give it an edge. "With the Web going more broadband and video becoming more of a character on the Web, LiveMotion is really going to take off because it's very After Effects-like; it's much more pixel-based than it is vector-based."

Adobe (adbe) Beta testers agreed that Flash has the edge when it comes to scripting capabilities, and this is one reason the products may be able to co-exist -- designers can use each product for the tasks it performs best.

John Nack, a LiveMotion beta tester and interactive designer at Agency.com, said he thinks the products should be given every opportunity to work together. "What I would like to see happen is a file format that allows you to exchange animations between the two, kind of like the way EPS works between (Adobe) Illustrator and (Macromedia) Freehand," Nack said. "Once we have that, we can use each tool to its best advantage."

Adobe also has the advantage of a familiar interface. There are few creative professionals out there who don't use at least one Adobe product -- most commonly Photoshop -- and Adobe tends to migrate controls from product to product whenever possible. This unified interface makes it easier for designers unfamiliar with the new software to pick it up quickly and makes the Adobe entry the logical choice for users who don't already employ Flash.

"If you use After Effects, LiveMotion is really easy," Idea Integration's Goto said, noting that the animation timeline in LiveMotion is almost identical to the one in After Effects.

Indeed, according to Adobe senior product manager Michael Ninness, LiveMotion's "target customer is an existing Adobe customer who doesn't own Flash yet or has tried it and it's so different from the Adobe user interface that they don't like it."

Ninness is also quick to point at that although Flash creates only Flash-format animations, "LiveMotion outputs to multiple formats, and Flash is just one of those formats."

Drake said LiveMotion has also taken on some characteristics of another Adobe product -- the ImageReady Web graphics editor -- and improved them. "Whereas Flash still has some bugs to work out as far as handling JPEGs, LiveMotion has amazing JPEG compression," he said. "It's unmatched. ImageReady does a great job with JPEG compression, and LiveMotion is like that times 10."

Goto agreed LiveMotion's compression capabilities are superior to those of Flash. She cited an example: "We had a project where we had animated GIFs, and we tried to compress them in Flash and then redid them in LiveMotion and the compressed file was about 10K, as opposed to about 40K with Flash."

Still, Drake said, "I think Flash will always be a little bit smoother as far as vector animation goes. LiveMotion is still in the early stages as far as handling the vector stuff. I've had some issues with it fully rendering some files and using EPS and vector images from Illustrator."

However, Drake is quick to point out that Adobe is moving quickly to correct bugs in the beta release and to improve other features in LiveMotion.

Goto said that since Flash has been around longer and Macromedia has had greater opportunity to incorporate user feedback, that product is naturally more evolved than the brand-new LiveMotion. However, she said, "I would suspect that in the next product round they'd be very close competitively at the advanced level."

Drake said Adobe has a difficult road ahead of it "because people are going to compare LiveMotion to Flash. So it has to be able to do what Flash does and then some to really compete. Or else Adobe is going to drown."