What is Cinemation?

In the beginning, there was MacroMind Director, and it was good. But there was a catch. Director was impossible to use unless you invested a considerable amount of time and effort in learning to use the program. Enter Cinemation, a new tool for creating animated business presentations that's easy enough for novices to use, yet powerful enough to satisfy the needs of savvy presenters and trainers.

Making Movies

Cinemation takes its cue from the movies. It’s a frame-based animator that combines motion, sound, and QuickTime video into interactive presentations and training materials. You edit your presentations with Cinemation's tools in much the same fashion as you would edit a film.

You can create presentations with Cinemation in one of two ways. If you're in a hurry and need to turn your work around in a mailer of hours, you can use the AutoMotion feature to animate existing presentations from Aldus Persuasion or Microsoft PowerPoint, Simply import a presentation, select a Cinemation template, and activate a few commands. Cinemation does the rest.

The ability to work with existing Persuasion and PowerPoint files is especially useful if your organization has accumulated a substantial library of presentations created with these programs. No other multimedia presentation program, including Macromedia's Magic, comes close to this level of ease of use for creating simple animated presentations. Cinemation comes packaged with a variety of design templates, including backgrounds and borders, that you can incorporate into your animations by using the program's AutoMotion feature.

For more-original and more-sophisticated presentations, you can build movies from scratch, using Cinemation's excellent animation and painting tools. The program's clean and well-crafted interface makes this a fairly painless process. Unlike Magic, which constantly shuttles users among four different modes, Cinemation sticks to two modes — animation and painting.

Take One

You create your movies one frame at a time in the Movie window and edit them — either frame by frame or by ranges of frames — in the Filmstrips window. The Filmstrips window displays numbered thumbnail versions of each movie frame. To view the fruits of your labor, you play movies in this window, using the program’s VCR-like Controls palette.

You can use Cinemation's painting tools to create objects for your movie, or you can import objects from other programs. Cinemation imports PICT, PICS, and QuickTime files as well as Scrapbook files from applications such as Persuasion and PowerPoint.

You can also attach sound to any object or frame in a movie, either by recording sounds with a Mac LC or IIsi microphone (Cinemation does not support the MacRecorder) or by importing snd resources and SoundEdit files.

If the objects for your movies aren't already animated, as they would be in PICS and QuickTime files, you can use one of three animation methods to set them in motion. The easiest is to click on Cinemation's Record button and drag an object across the screen (you can smooth the action later). Alternatively, you can set a beginning and end frame for an object and have Cinemation fill in the motion between them, a method called tweening. The third and most advanced method — and which gives you the most control over your animation — requires you to work one frame at a time.

You can create motion by scaling, cropping, and rotating objects as well as by dragging them. To vary the rate of motion, you specify a percentage of inertia with the Fill in Motion command.

Control over the objects in your movies begins and ends with Cinemation's Tools palette, which you can toggle between the animation and painting modes. In animation mode, the palette provides tools for creating circular or rotating motion, moving all the objects in a frame, tagging (naming) frames and objects, adding sound to frames and objects, and creating links within or among movies. Pop-up hierarchical menus let you select named objects and frames. In painting mode, the Tools palette holds a paintbrush, a bucket, and a pencil as well as object tools, an eraser, a dropper for picking up color from the screen, a lasso, a marquee, a tool for creating custom-sized easels, and tools for creating patterns and fills.

Once you’ve put the pieces of a movie together, you can edit your presentation by cutting and pasting frames (including frames from other movies). Although you can’t set movies to run for a specified duration, you can speed up and slow down the action by specifying the number of frames to run per second.

Ghostly Features

With the program's professional-level Ghosting feature, you can display grayedout images from other frames within the frame you’re working on, so you can align and trace objects for precise editing. This capability is particularly useful when you’re creating animations frame by frame. Cinemation also lets you create movies within movies, allowing for some fairly impressive effects, such as a planet revolving around a sun as a moon revolves around the planet. You can even go a step further and import and place animated clips within the frames of your movies.

You don’t have to use a programming language to make your presentations interactive either. Cinemation's link tool and a simple dialog box can turn any object into a clickable button that lakes viewers to another frame in the same movie or to a different movie altogether. You can also program Cinemation to branch automatically to another frame as the movie plays. Branches can be set up so that they're one-way or round-trip, returning viewers to the frame they branched from.

The link tool also lets you create pauses and transition effects between frames. You can pause a movie at a designated frame for a number of seconds or until a specified event occurs. The package provides 20 transition effects in all. including fades, wipes, and reveals.

If you want to modify a movie, you can use Cinemation’s Customize window to mix and match objects (objects can be images, text, movies within movies, and QuickTime clips) as well as change objects globally. You can maintain a library of movies and mix and match sections or entire movies to quickly create tailor-made presentations.

The Cinemation package comes with nearly 9 megabytes of AutoMotion and custom design templates, clip animations, music, and sounds, A selection of XCMDs allows you to play your movies back from within HyperCard and attach HyperCard scripts to buttons, and you can use CinePlayer, a playback utility provided with the package, to distribute your movies.

The Bottom Line

Although Cinemation isn't sophisticated enough to substitute for Director at the high end of the animated-presentation-program scale, it is a superior midrange tool for creating polished presentations quickly and easily, A few minor bugs mar Vividus’ otherwise outstanding first effort: nonetheless, we found Cinemation easier to use than Magic, by virtue of its fewer modes and easier method for building transitions. Cinemation’s performance is also better than Magic’s for loading and playing movies, and the program's ability to animate Persuasion and PowerPoint slides is a real plus.

Overall, creating animated presentations has never been so easy, and even skilled professionals may find Cinemation a useful tool for fast prototyping of work destined for a more sophisticated program.

Miley, Michael. (July 1992). Cinemation. MacUser. (pgs. 54-55).

Download Cinemation for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II