No, this isn't FARR SITE. This is a what amounts to a review in progress. The fact is, Electrifier Pro from Electrifier, Inc. is so powerful and can do so many things, I've been lost in multimedia heaven for the past couple of weeks when I should have been writing this review! For those of you unfamiliar with timeline-based authoring, I'll keep the language simple and the descriptions short.

The above autoplaying QuickTime 3 movie is just one of the many experiments I've conducted in the process of exploring the capabilities of this amazing application. For the record, Electrifier is timeline-based multimedia Web authoring software for creating fast-downloading, interactive multimedia. You can use just about any sort of content imaginable, including vector or bitmap animation, digitzed audio, MIDI, video, 3-D, VR, as well as all the included special effects (love that fire). In the example above, I took the byline image from the March 22 column and "electrified" it: even for a multimedia novice, it wasn't very hard at all.

With Electrifier Pro, all you do is drag and drop. After deciding whether you want to use a sprite track for your "actor," just take any content file you want to use and drag it onto the Layout window. In this case I used the column JPEG from March 8, 1999, after first using Electrifier's nifty compression capability (Sorenson codec!) to squeeze it to less than half its original size. From Electrifier's Effects palette, I dragged the icons for fade, zoom, and spin onto the image. I adjusted the timeline for each of these effects in the Structure window. An Inspector palette allows for infinitely small, precise adjustments of timing, placement, and other parameters, or you can simply drag the horizontal bars in the Structure window itself. The Preview window uses a standard QuickTime controller for playing your new creation, so you don't have to switch to another application to see what you've created: everything takes place within Electrifier.

The fire effect is a "no bandwidth" goodie, because it really consists of instructions to tell your computer how to create what you're looking at. From within the Layout window, you click on the Fire tool (in the toolbar) and then select an area or portion of your actor where you want the effect to be visible. The fire itself is customizable for sputter rate, water rate, spread rate, and so forth. I also used the interactive ripple effect. Yes, that's right, interactive: just click on the ripples and see what happens! Is that cool or is that cool?

The dancing sheep's head was a last-minute add-on, and to drop it in and get it hopping around like you see only took a minute or two! Are you beginning to see why I like this program?

(Note: in the process of working with this movie, I learned that it didn't display properly on some PCs.The answer? A QuickTime 3 for Windows bug that apparently requires widths to be multiples of 32 pixels. Electrifier support ensured me that they were working with Apple to get this fixed.)

As any multimedia professional and the long-suffering Electrifier marketing contact person waiting for this review will quickly perceive, I'm learning as I go. (All you authoring professionals out there wilI want to grab the mouse out of my hand to take over -- and who could blame you?) I already have a hard drive full of experiments I was hoping to show you, but therein lies a lesson most of you have hopefully already learned.

Last night I spent almost three hours modifying the above movie to within an inch of its life. It was magnificent: I added flying sheep, a whole squadron of them! A huge sheep's face similar to the one above materialized out of the final fire and did a dance! There were more sound effects! I was on a roll, totally engrossed with this great software, but I forgot to save my work as I went along! I decided to edit the path of the dancing sheep's head and, well, you know. I crashed the application and my movie went "poof"! I promptly tripled the memory allocation for Electrifier, but of course it was too late.

So your reviewer fell on his face big-time! By way of consolation, I offer you this GIF animation from my own Web site that I was able to turn into a QuickTime 3 movie (will open in a separate window) with fire and sound effects in just a couple of minutes with Electrifier Pro. I've given you a controller so you can back the movie up and watch the fire burn. It's actually rather soothing. CAUTION: this one is 464 pixels wide, a multiple of 16 but not of 32, and may crash your Windows PC. For that matter, it's around 110K and might give low-memory Macs trouble. But give it a try and see.

This software is awesome. To review all its capabilities would take weeks. There are powerful compression capabilities built in, which you can employ to produce video that streams as soon as the page loads. You can design in any sort of interactivity you can imagine. And there are at least 150 special video effects and trasnsitions at your disposal. Please visit Electrifier's showcase sites which take full advantage of everything this program can do -- you will be amazed.

Unfortunately for the rest of you novices, this is professional gear and will set you back $595 for the full program. But I urge you to download the demo from the Electrifier Web site and have a look. This is a wondrous piece of work and will no doubt make me famous when I finally learn to save my work properly.

PROS:	Very easy to use. Astounding capabilities. Even a nimrod can make a spinning, zooming, burning JPEG, so just think what you can do!
CONS:	Not a one discovered so far, unless it's that the power of this software seems to have no end. And I was unable to locate a preference selection for "auto-saving". . .
CONCLUSION:	This application rocks. A solid "5" rating. (My apologies to everyone who's been waiting for this review, too: my only excuse is that I was having too much fun working with Electrifier to stop!)

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and welcomes your comments .

September 07, 2008