Understanding Adobe LiveMotion terminology

Understanding compositions, objects, layers, and animations will help you master LiveMotion. With Adobe LiveMotion, you can easily design, create, and optimize Web animations, rollovers, navigation bars, and graphics. LiveMotion exports your work to Web animation standard formats--Flash, QuickTime, and GIF. You can also use LiveMotion to create and export small graphics as well as entire Web pages.

Compositions

Basic LiveMotion documents that you create. They contain one or more objects, and are displayed in the Composition window.

You can export individual objects in an image file format for placement in a Web page, or you can export the entire composition as a Web page in HTML format. You can also export compositions and individual objects as Web-ready animation files in Flash files (.swf) and QuickTime formats, as animated GIFs, and as PNG or JPEG image files.

Objects

Building blocks that you create and work with in LiveMotion compositions. LiveMotion is an object-based application.

There are four kinds of objects:

• Geometric objects are those that you create with the drawing tools.
• Text objects are blocks of text that you create using the type tool or the text field tool.
• Image objects are bitmap graphics that you import into LiveMotion.
• Sound objects are audio files that you import for animations and rollover effects. Sound objects do not appear in the Composition window. They appear only in the Timeline window.

Shapes

Objects have visual boundaries:

• Geometric objects have either a regular path shape (rectangles, rounded rectangles, polygons, or ellipses, for example), or an irregular path shape.
• Text objects are the shape of the individual characters in the text.
• Bitmap images generally have a rectangular shape, unless they have an alpha channel or an active matte.
• EPS vector images are in the shape of the artwork itself. For example, an EPS vector image of a flower would be in the shape of that flower.

Different shape objects in LiveMotion A. Geometric object B. Text object C. Image object (bitmap) D. Image object (EPS vector)

Object layers

The building blocks of objects. Object layers are part of an individual object; they are not part of the composition as a whole. An object is made up of 1-99 layers, with each layer being the shape of that object.

When you first create an object, it has a single layer. You can add, delete, reorder, and offset layers at any time. For example, you can add a layer to an object, and then offset it to simulate a shadow for the object.


A LiveMotion object and its layers A. Four-layered object as it appears in a composition B. Individual layers in their stacking order C. Layers shown in the Object Layers palette

Layer attributes

How the properties--color, gradients, distortion, and opacity--of a layer are defined. You can apply attributes to any layer individually.

By applying different attributes to each layer, you can create a variety of effects and create complex objects. For example, to create a button out of a simple geometric object, you might give it three layers, and apply different effects to each layer. You could emboss the top layer and fill it with a texture. You could make the second layer wider and fill it with a color to give the effect of an outline around the button. And you could offset the third layer, and fill it with semitransparent gray to simulate a shadow for the button.

Styles

Collections of properties. By applying a style to an object, you can change the object's appearance without changing its shape. For example, you can apply a style to a text object to give the object several layers. The text object would then have all the attributes of that style. There are also animation styles and rollover styles that apply only to animations and rollovers. You can save styles in the Styles palette and apply them to other objects.


Applying a style from the Styles palette

Animations

The application of changes to an object over time. You can do this for one or more objects simultaneously, and you can even animate changes to individual layers in an object. For example, you can rotate just the angle of a gradient effect applied to an object.

LiveMotion provides features that enable you to create rollovers and JavaScript actions. You can also update graphics and text in existing Web pages.

LiveMotion file format (.liv)

This file format embeds all objects and placed artwork in the composition, along with their modifications and attributes, so that you can reedit the objects at any time.