MovieWorks, an application suite like ClarisWorks or Microsoft Office, brings multimedia authoring to the masses. Interactive Solutions has assembled a group of applications — video recording and editing; sound recording and editing; and painting, animation, and interactive authoring — into a package that’s similar to Macromedia’s Director Studio but takes just an hour to learn and costs only about $100.
Each stand-alone application in the suite does its job well, but the sum productivity is much greater than its parts. You use the Sound program to record and edit audio, the Paint app for painting, and the Animator for 2D cel animation. The key to creating a good suite of apphcations is integration: Each program in a suite should interact seamlessly with the others, and in this respect MovieWorks shines.
The cornerstone of MovieWorks is the Composer apphcation, where you bring togetiier all the media elements you’ve created in other MovieWorks applications. You make MovieWorks projects with a series of individual scenes tihat can include QuickTime movies, animation, sounds, text, pictures, and buttons. Scenes can contain common elements and background. You construct them in a timeline-based palette called the Sequencer, which lists all the elements currently in a scene both chronologically and hierarchically. Here, you can set or adjust a variety of settings that control how the movie plays back, including the duration, start time, stop time, and layer order of any element.
To manage all the media elements in a scene or project, you use the Composer’s Objects and Scenes windows. The Objects window shows a folder full of all the media assets available in a given scene. Graphic objects appear as small pictures of themselves, and text objects as representational icons. Each object also has a small icon in its upper left comer to indicate what type of element it is. The Scenes window presents a visual index to all the scenes in a project.
From Composer you can import media files into the project, set a projectwide background image, add text and captions, create hyperlinks between scenes, add animated paths for graphics to follow, export projects as QuickTime movies, and create stand- alone players for distribution. The Effects Sequencer also gives you control over functions such as scaling, transitions, and paths. For quick access to the other components of MovieWorks, a Main Tools palette acts as a launch pad for each application.
Of course, you can’t realize any multimedia project without graphics, so most users start with the MovieWorks Paint application. You can access nearly every tool in Paint from the main palette, where you’ll find the usual assortment of func- tions — selection tools, paintbrushes and airbrushes, an eraser, shape and line tools, color and pattern palettes, and a color picker. One especially nice touch is a floating help window. As you roll the cursor over, say, the line tool or the eraser, a succinct description appears in the help box, a boon for first-time MovieWorks users and multimedia novices. (Unfortunately, Paint is the only application in the suite that offers this truly useful feature.) Paint doesn’t include Adobe Photoshop-style plug-ins, layers, or multiple undos, but it’s robust enough to handle most painting chores for creating backgrounds, animation cels, and buttons.
One of the best features in all of MovieWorks’ media-creation apps is the Save To MovieWorks command. With it you can save a paint, animation, sound, or video file directly into an open MovieWorks scene, without having to save the file first and then import it into a project. To minimize RAM overhead, the Save To MovieWorks command allows you to save a file and quit the application at the same time.
Animator, MovieWorks’ easy-to-use app for cel animation, offers a basic set of drawing functions — including a pencil, shape tools, a selection tool, and a paint bucket — which are useful only for rudimentary pictures. You’ll probably want to create your cel-based art in the Paint application first. Once you create the art and import it, Animator produces a series of frames, places a grapldc in each frame, and sets the frame rate. The effect is similar to a flip book. When you finish the animation, you can save it as a stand-alone animation file or export it directly into a MovieWorks scene.
Aside from the Composer app, Sound — a 16-bit audio recorder and editor — is probably MovieWorks’ strongest application. It can record audio from a Mac’s built-in mini audio inputs or RCA audio inputs in CD-quality (44KHz) sound. You can edit the sound files using simple cut-and-paste commands. For more finessed audio tracks, Sound provides easy access to volume levels and built-in filters such as flange, echo, reverse, and fade. Like all MovieWorks applications, Sound is very easy to use and does its job well, but lacks higher-end features. Specifically, even though it records sound in stereo, only one audio track is visible. The Sound app also lacks mixing tools.
MovieWorks’ Video application resembles a glamorized QuickTime MoviePlayer. It provides basic capture and editing functions but nothing more. The recording settings allow you to control the frame rates, codecs, number of colors, and source. Editing is as simple as highfighting video segments, then cutting and pasting. The Video app has no built-in filters, effects, or transitions, but you can get wipes and dissolves from Composer’s transitions command.
MovieWorks has its quirks. Granted, most users in MovieWorks’ target audience won’t have two monitors hooked to their Macs, but previewing MovieWorks projects on two-monitor systems doesn’t work properly: This function sends the second monitor’s preview askew and obscures most of the project’s content. Also, except for the Paint application’s outstanding help system, none of MovieWorks’ components provide context-sensitive help or even balloon help, a curious omission in a product aimed at beginners.
Clearly, the engineers behind MovieWorks had one simple objective: to make a multimedia authoring suite that even the greenest novice could use. For the most part, they’ve succeeded. Every component in MovieWorks performs its job perfectly and does so without bells or whistles. Almost anyone who can turn on a Mac can figure out how to use each application in a matter of minutes.
Interactive Solutions describes MovieWorks as “the multimedia production tool for everyone.” But the package might more accurately be called “the multimedia production tool for anyone” since it squarely targets the creative novice.
Sanchez, Rick. (March 1999). MovieWorks 4.1. MacAddict. (pgs. 40-41).
Interactive Solutions
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