Sams Teach Yourself Adobe LiveMotion in 24 Hours Book

Adobe LiveMotion offers Web animators a tremendous number of features, so getting up the learning curve can be a challenge for a new user. Teach Yourself Adobe LiveMotion in 24 Hours may not teach you everything about LiveMotion in a day, but it'll certainly take you a way up the slope. Written with the beginner Web designer in mind, Part I focuses on introducing LiveMotion and its toolset while educating you on how Web graphics work. But while the author appropriately details the differences between GIF, JPG, and PNG graphic image formats, LiveMotion is a tool for creating vector-based animation for the Web, and the chapter "Understanding Web Graphics" makes no mention of the Flash, QuickTime (which LiveMotion doesn't utilise), or even animated GIF formats. Parts II (Working with LiveMotion Objects), III (Colour, Shape, and Style), and IV (Creating Static and Dynamic Images for the Web) detail using the application itself, and Parts V and VI wrap up the book with examples of animation and multimedia and designing and optimising advanced Web presentations. Although primarily an animator's tool, this book takes a different approach to LiveMotion, looking at it and using it as if it were a Web designer's tool. Interesting chapters about creating rollovers, using LiveMotion for page compositing, and 22 pages on setting type illustrate this. Meanwhile, the whole section on creating animation in LiveMotion is just over 20 pages long. An inexpensive book, Teach Yourself Adobe LiveMotion doesn't have an accompanying CD-ROM or any colour illustrations, making chapter 10, "Getting Colourful", somewhat theoretical. The book as a whole reads more like a reference manual than a tutorial, but the detailed index will help you quickly find what you need. For people who need to learn from structured tutorials, there are other books. For those who like to create things on their own and need only a reference book with examples, this is a good choice. --Mike Caputo, amazon.com Read More