32 notes for a ludic video

LiveStage Professional was a software application developed and sold by Totally Hip, a Canadian company. Recently it was either greyware, or simply available for sale via the company site but completely unsupported as the company, I believe, went into receivership several years ago. (So I've no idea what actually happened if you actually purchased the software in the last couple years (approximately 2007 to 2009), i.e., whether you actually received working software, a key, and so on. My copy, which I purchased when the company still existed, still works, but I imagine either a system or QuickTime upgrade will eventually break it.) However, visiting their domain recently (www.totallyhip.com) would seem to indicate it is now gone for good as it has now gone.

So, what exactly is, or was, LiveStage Pro? It was authoring software that allowed you to access the programmatic and media layers built into QuickTime. It included a simple object orientated scripting language with an extensive library (QScript, for an example see Figure One), a reasonably decent manual, and a relatively intuitive way to build interactive QuickTime works via a stage metaphor and a local library of media artefacts. There was also a very supportive user community that existed via a company hosted email list, and it even managed to attract one Visual QuickStart Guide.

LiveStage remains, as far as I'm aware, the only program that allowed you to script and build interactive QuickTime files. While there are numerous programs that author multimedia, and routinely use QuickTime content as a part of their production process (for example QuickTime may be used as the container for video within a multimedia product), when you author in LiveStage you author in, and publish to, QuickTime. Personally this always appealed to me, simply because QuickTime's architecture is built from the ground up to deal with time based media, which is what I want to work in, and I think is a pretty fundamental quality in trying to think creatively and critically about networked video as a different sort of video object to just plain vanilla synced sound and image track with a beginning, middle and end. So the ability to author in, and publish within, QuickTime seemed to offer a simple route to achieving this, after all if I created a work with links within QuickTime then it seemed trivial to claim that I'd be making linked, or interactive, or at least hypertextual video.

(I think in practice it is not this simple, simply because QuickTime is just so, well, catholic. For example, I can make an interactive QuickTime work that consists of a series of soundtracks and stills. But this, presumably is not actually an interactive video by virtue of it being a QuickTime file as it contains no video. Or is it? A problem for another day that one.)

Figure One. Screenshot of LiveStage Pro QScript Reference Showing Sample of Control Statements and Variable Declarations.

Using LiveStage was quite straightforward. It employed a 'stage' metaphor similar to Flash where you could assemble your media artefacts (each of which would become a track within a QuickTime file). Sprite tracks, were easily created and then an image or images attached to them, and scripts written. The creation of buttons to control tracks, load URLs and other media was particularly easy, while the complexity of the work you could do was largely limited by your own programming skills (mine are very minor).

The extent of my own use of LiveStage was limited to making QuickTime movies that could read static XML files and load content on the basis of the file directories it contained, extensive use of child movies so that I could play with multi paned video works, the use of a variety of buttons to load child movies, stop, pause, slow and accelerate them, embedded URLs (hotspots), text tracks controlled by sprites to appear, disappear or vary their font size, and a mix of still image and videos loading in child movies that are all user controlled. In a couple of cases I experimented with QuickTime's ability to read PDF (on a Mac) to make some essays that combined text with still and moving image and audio.

Within the videoblogging community, and perhaps more broadly, there was considerable resistance to LiveStage in terms of its cost, and also possibly the learning curve required to use it for those coming to it from a non computational practice - for example video and film makers. In many ways this was not very different to the early experience of writers to HTML and the web where, in general, the rise of visual HTML editors was required (and then with blogging the development of simple to use CMS platforms) before there was very much adoption of the web. On the other hand this in no way seemed to have prevented the rise and acceptance of Flash as an authoring and publishing platform, and so it would seem reasonable to hypothesise that the reasons for the resistance to both authoring network specific video, and the purchase of the key software tool that made that possible, lies more with the historical attitudes individuals bought with their video practice online, rather than a simple issue of cost.

Figure Two. Screenshot of a LiveStage Pro project showing the stage (upper part) and the tracks (in these case 11 - 7 interactive sprite tracks, 2 child movie tracks, 1 video track, 1 image or picture track). This is from Lugano Train (2004). Click image to enlarge.

As Figure Two indicates, a QuickTime movie could be made up of any number of tracks, of multiple types, and the exported QuickTime movie would contain, after export, these tracks as distinct track types within the architecture. This is one of the conditions that allows for LiveStage to be able to script QuickTime, simply because as discrete objects within the QuickTime architecture they can be referenced programmatically, even after publication online. The strength of LiveStage was to make all of this available, and for you to make work that was as complicated, or simple, as you wished.

References

Sitter, Martin. LiveStage Professional 3 for Macintosh and Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide). Pearson Education, 2001.

LiveStage Pro Users Manual. Totally Hip.

Peterson, Matthew, Interactive QuickTime: Authoring Wired Media (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Publishing, 2004).