New Web graphics and animation product brings unparalleled flexibility for achieving new levels of entertaining and engaging Web sites

San Jose, Calif., (March 6, 2000) (Nasdaq:ADBE)--Adobe Systems Incorporated, the leader in digital publishing for Web, print and dynamic media, unveiled today Adobe® LiveMotion™ software. LiveMotion further extends Adobe’s integrated suite of professional Web production products by giving Web designers a flexible tool for creating high-impact, interactive graphics and engaging animations for the Web. Adobe LiveMotion enters public beta today from the Adobe.com Web site.

LiveMotion allows designers to create everything from individual dynamic Web graphics to complete pages that incorporate motion, sound and interactivity, all in an object-oriented, vector-based authoring environment. Additionally, LiveMotion exports to a wide range of graphics formats including, GIF, JPEG, PNG, Adobe Photoshop®, and the popular Flash™(.swf) format. LiveMotion will also support the W3C’s Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format in the next release of the product. This extreme flexibility in output options will enable Web designers to work with maximum efficiency and productivity while exercising unlimited creative freedom.

"Adobe LiveMotion is a huge advance in Web animation software," said John Nack, Interactive Designer, AGENCY.COM, a leading international Internet professional services firm. "Working with the Flash authoring tool, we had to bring in elements piece by piece and reconstruct our layouts, but LiveMotion lets us import entire compositions from Illustrator and Photoshop natively, while preserving the layers. With LiveMotion, we feel like we’ve traded in sledgehammers for scalpels. We’re that much closer to the way we want to animate."

LiveMotion is tightly integrated with Adobe’s complete Web authoring solution— Adobe GoLive®, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator®—to simplify the creation of entertaining and engaging Web experiences. LiveMotion leverages the familiar and intuitive Adobe user interface, with menus and options that are second nature to the large majority of Web designers who already depend heavily on other Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator. This decreases the learning curve and enables designers and developers to move into a productive and efficient workflow right from the start.

"In today’s e-commerce driven Internet, competition for attention is fierce. Designers are finding it necessary to incorporate animation, interactivity, high-quality sound and video, and other technological advancements to make their Web sites stand out in the crowd," said Hank Skorny, senior director of Adobe’s Internet Products Group. "LiveMotion provides Web professionals with a streamlined production workflow for creating and delivering visually engaging content that will increase customer reach and retention."

More than a composition tool for animating imported content, Adobe LiveMotion contains its own robust set of content creation tools that allow designers to create stunning effects without having to use an additional outside application. This differs from other products that require separate applications for creating design elements. LiveMotion provides vector-based drawing and shape tools that borrow from Photoshop and Illustrator. For example, designers can use the LiveMotion Pen tool to gain access to the path (or the Bézier curve) of an object, and then change or edit individual anchor points. Also, any combination of creative effects can be saved as a Style and then applied to other objects. This makes it easy to maintain consistency throughout the LiveMotion composition while increasing productivity.

Extreme Integration and Flexibility
Live Motion leverages the Adobe graphics engine to provide support for both the native Photoshop and Illustrator file formats. Imported content can be enhanced and animated using a wide variety of powerful design features. Designers can place native Photoshop and Illustrator files directly into LiveMotion or open layered Photoshop and Illustrator files as keyframe sequences, composite objects, or as a series of independent objects. Designers no longer are forced to give up the flexibility of layers as they are by other Flash (.swf) authoring environments that require layered files to be flattened and converted into a composite file format before being able to work with them.

Inspired by the After Effects® Timeline, the LiveMotion Timeline is object-based, and not layer-based. Nearly every attribute — position, opacity, shape, rotation, scale, color, special effect attributes, text, etc. — of every object can be independently animated in a non destructive manner. Designers can easily edit animated or static attributes at any time in the editing process, so they do not need to start over if they change their mind. This powerful editing method keeps designers interacting with their composition at all times, editing the animation attributes right in the Timeline rather than burying them in a series of convoluted dialog boxes.

Availability
Adobe LiveMotion is currently available as public beta for Macintosh and Windows, including Windows 2000 on the Adobe Web site at www.adobe.com/products/livemotion/main.html. Adobe LiveMotion is expected to be available in Q2 2000, and is expected to have an Estimated Street Price of $399 (USD) in the United States only.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Founded in 1982, Adobe Systems (www.adobe.com) builds award-winning software solutions for Web and print publishing. Its graphic design, imaging, dynamic media, and authoring tools enable customers to create, publish and deliver visually rich content for various types of media. Headquartered in San Jose, California, Adobe is the fourth largest U.S.-based personal software company, with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion.