Please read the 'Known Problems' section below to get familiar with the problems we already know about. Chances are that they will get fixed tomorrow. It would be great to find out about all the others.

Main changes:

General

- completely new User Interface
- complete rewrite of the rendering. It is much much faster.
- much faster media addition, deletion, etc...
- we completely suppressed the need for the update button. Every change is now real-time. Edit a title, a setting...and see the effect in real time.
- improved every aspect of media interaction. You can now click on a media and PulpMotion will immediately move the playhead to the position of that media in the animation.
- when you hit play, it starts playing from the current position. The soundtrack is also synchronized to the current position.
- new welcome screen
- new 'New Composition from Theme...' dialog
- we suppressed the media inspector palette and integrated it into the main window

Themes

- new 'New Composition from Theme...' dialog
- themes have now presets: when you choose a theme, you will have access to some presets also called 'Variations'

- the theme selector is now located to the right, and lets you see the various themes and their presets. You need to double clic or choose 'Apply Theme' to change the current theme.
- a number of new themes have been introduced
- the non PRO themes are currently not in the application by default. They will be available later for download.

Media

- new Media manager with the following features:

• much faster (Core Data based) and much smaller memory footprint
• native support for Aperture and Lightroom, including support for multiple catalogs
• full screen mode: choose your media in full screen
• new date chooser lets you access your videos and photos by date.

- support for text media: easily add text-only slides to your presentation

Media timing

- fine tune your media length.

Sound

- support for multiple songs in the soundtrack. You can drop multiple audio files, either in the background music track, or in the audio annotation track.

- support for audio annotations.

Clicking on the recording button brings the recording window and lets you record a soundtrack that can be associated to one or more media.

- ability to fine tune all media durations. Ability to lock durations and to adjust media lengths to the spanning soundtrack length.
- adjust the track volumes.
- new soundwave editor lets you choose portions of soundtracks.

Zones of interest

- you can now add and edit zones of interest in your pictures

Export and outputs

- new mode lets you control the aspect ratio of your composition

- added more control in the export window for the motion blur export
- time estimations for the export are now displayed
- a new output window is now available. It lets you access the outputs, preview them and convert them in many formats

Known problems:

- clicking in the preview window while the composition is playing causes the composition to jump.
- the export window is too high....will get fixed soon.
- most themes have only 1 preset for now. All other presets will be added in the coming days.
- the soundwave editor is slow and does not correctly depict the audio wave. The final sound editor will be in the next beta.

We are getting very close to our release...and here is beta 5 with the following changes.

Main changes:

• added presets for all the themes
• the sound editor is now functional and will let you choose a portion of your sound file to play.
• much faster startup time
• lots of cosmetic bug fixes
• the settings are much better organized now. Some help windows have been added with active links to access some less obvious options when you need to.

Known problems:

- clicking in the preview window while the composition is playing causes the composition to jump.
- the export window is too high....will get fixed soon.

We are releasing our 1.0 version today. We want to thank all our beta testers for their great feedback.

Main changes:

• added new presets for all the themes
• added more options to the Bespoke Museum theme
• the sound editor is now functional and will let you choose a portion of your sound file to play.
• lots of cosmetic bug fixes
• the settings are much better organized now. Some help windows have been added with active links to access some less obvious options when you need to.

Download

Features

PulpMotion Pro brings the following new features:

Timeline and media

• The bottom timeline has seen pretty intense changes.

  
  First of all, you will notice that:

  • the music cell is gone. You can now have multiple songs in the composition.

  • two sound tracks have been added. They are not exactly the same. The top track is used for audio comments while the bottom track is used for audio.
  • there is a new intro cell. While you will never use the cell directly, you can now drag music below the cell to control the music that gets played during the intro.
    
  • audio volumes can be controlled at the media level.

  • the audio waveform can be visualized and edited
• the media browser has been extended. It supports media from Aperture and has a new Full Screen mode that lets you choose your media with all the comfort of your big screen. In addition, we added a timeline that lets you select media by date.
• zones of interest can now be edited. This lets you create amazing animations such as this one

Text media

• you can now create text media. Control click on a media cell in the time to choose 'Add Text Media'. This will open the text editor, which works much like SimpleText. You can edit text, change fonts and insert images as well.

Timing

• timing can now be edited at the media level: you can use the default composition timing or impose a specific duration for each media.
• sophisticated timing adjustments: you can adjust the timing of a group of media to match the length of the soundtrack underneath. You can lock the timing of media to ensure they won't be affected by adjustments.

Worflow and Performances

• no need to update anymore when you do small changes:
• performance has been vastly increased. You will notice that moving media around, adding media to the timeline, etc... is nearly instantaneous now. The progress bar is something of the past. Please note that on some occasions we still need to bring a progress bar, for example when you drop large images into the timeline, because PulpMotion HAS TO convert them into smaller images.

Export and quality

• Safe frame: you can now visualize the exact appearance of the output by specifying the aspect ratio of the output at design time. The preview will mask the rendered area that fall outside the safe box and will give you several options to make rthe composition fit in the box..
• Export quality has been increased in various themes by using some super high quality image resizing algorithm.
• Motion blur can be fully customized.

Themes

• This initial beta does not contain all the original Pulpmotion themes
• a new book theme has been added as a teaser.

Known problems

We are aware of the following

• the interface is not final...a number of things are going to change, including in the way we let you access documents.
• no documentation...this is by far the most serious problem as some sophisticated functions need explaining. We will address it soon.
• Media Manager full screen: the timeline on the top is missing some icons that activate some important functions. Will be fixed soon.

Thanks for taking part in the beta testing. Please send us your comments at : beta-testing@aquafadas.com and try to use the word PulpMotion in the subject of your mail.