Customisable type effects

Effects in LiveType 2 are like digital building blocks; they are modular behaviours that include movement, transformation and timing parameters. The 212 pre-built effects that come with LiveType give you the power to add fades, zooms, rotations, lighting effects and motion to your titles. Customise and save any effect, or create your own effects from scratch using the keyframe editor in LiveType 2. Each keyframe in your title acts as a container for all the effect parameters for a word or character, eliminating the need to manage long keyframe stacks.

Complete creative control

LiveType treats each character in a title as a separate layer, giving you total control over its behaviour. You can apply effects on a character-by-character basis, control layer order within a title, and precisely adjust each character’s timing. The sequencing, looping, speed, duration, delay and randomising features in LiveType give you the creative freedom to make every effect unique.

It’s easy to create a curved track for your title and position it anywhere you want on the screen. Use any Apple system font or choose from one of the dozens of animated LiveFonts built into LiveType. You can check your work with a render preview or evaluate your effects in real time using the dynamic Wireframe preview.

LiveFonts

Designed by professional animators, LiveFonts are sophisticated animated fonts that are as easy to use as system fonts. LiveFonts have animations built into each character, using vector-based computer animations, video footage or sequences of still photographs.

Lay out characters and spaces with ease, curve the baseline if you want, and apply effects to your LiveFonts text. LiveFonts composed of vector animations — such as Tremor, Script, Ribbon, Computer, Blueprint and Gust — are completely scalable and can be further modified with colour effects.

The powerful FontMaker utility included in LiveType lets you create your own LiveFonts with characters built from virtually any graphical object — from 3D animations and images created in Photoshop to short video clips.

Animated design elements

LiveType comes with 350 broadcast-quality, royalty-free, animated textures and objects that you can use in your projects. Place them as backgrounds, matte them to text or objects, or crop them for use as lower thirds or sidebar graphics.

LiveType textures. Textures in LiveType are colourful animated patterns that can be used as full-screen or partial backgrounds or as animated fills for matte effects.

LiveType objects. LiveType objects are graphical elements with an alpha channel, designed to frame or emphasise text. They can be sized, rotated, coloured and stretched. Add a shadow, glow or extrusion and apply effects just as though they were text characters.

Other visual elements. You can also import your own graphics, images, and movies for use in your LiveType projects. Like objects and textures, these elements can be modified and positioned in a wide variety of ways.

Apple-designed templates

LiveType includes dozens of Apple-designed templates for NTSC, PAL and HD formats. The templates include commonly used screen layouts, such as opening titles and lower thirds, and come with an alpha channel layer so you can key the title over your video. Use a template to get started fast and modify it to suit your needs. You can easily mix and match design elements from a variety of templates. To work even more efficiently, create and save your own templates for future use.