More positive Totally Hip LiveStage Press from Silicon Valley:
QuickTime Authoring Tools:
Livestage
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The first, and in some ways the most sophisticated tool is LiveStage from Totally Hip Software Inc. (www.totallyhip.com). This product was developed by a small, seemingly merry band of creative programmers in Vancouver, B.C., who are apparently in the process of moving to Northern California. Hopefully, this won't change their pricing strategy, because LiveStage is very reasonably priced at $199, which includes WebPainter 3.1 (a cool cel-animation program for animated GIFs; WebPainter also exports QuickTime vector-image format files). Their bundle also includes a nice selection of clip animations for the Web.
LiveStage is a pretty amazing program. In fact, you can build a whole multimedia application within QuickTime using LiveStage. To accomplish this feat, however, LiveStage uses its own interactive scripting language that is targeted to Macromedia Director-level multimedia producers. From a video producer's point of view, LiveStage has a major omission. It does not yet support "multi-image sprites" such as video! For this reason--because of this column and magazine's focus on video--we must hold further comment until future releases.
Author Bio: Contributing Editor Jon Leland is an award-winning video producer, Website designer, consultant, and keynote speaker. Formerly the Director of Creative Services at the USA Network, Leland is currently President and Creative Director of Communication Bridges, in the San Rafael CA
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Note from DH about video and "multi-image sprites" in LS 1.01:
This guy didn't know that multi-image sprites are made possible in LiveStage but will be more easily accomplished with video tracks etc in LS 2.0 or Pro.
The goal of LS 1.0 was to create the sophisticated scripting architecture to make LiveStage real powerful, then add more power user features and average joe end user point and click scripting features in LS 2.0 or Pro. I have been told that the merry band of programmers at THW are going all out on the new version of LiveStage.
Since I am on the seed site for LiveStage, I can say that video and 3D, and VR and other features of QuickTime 4 and video streaming will be in the next major addition to LiveStage which is in process at this time. Totally Hip is going all out on LiveStage Pro or 2.0 which is to be released some time in the summer for Macintosh and Windows. |
