The StillMotion Creator is designed to allow the user to create animated video from digital still photographs. It is a piece of software that mimics the actual functionality of an animation camera stand, where you can apply pan, zoom and rotate to images. The completed animation can then be output in the Flash SWF format, or as a high resolution file for professional video or HDTV.

There are three versions of the StillMotion Creator. The standard version supports Flash only output, while the Plus and Pro versions both support AVI. The Plus version supports AVI resolutions of 400x400 or less, while the Pro version supports unlimited resolutions. The standard version sells for $99.95, the Plus version sells for $149.95 and the Pro version sells for $249.95.

Bill Strum, President of Imagematics, explained how the StillMotion software was developed. He said: “The Internet is replete with still images and in order to add animation, pans and zooms, you had to download the file. You had to put some sort of a plug-in in the file, or you had to use an AVI format, which of course, is yet another set of plug-ins and becomes a bandwidth hog.”

"Effectively, what you’re seeing on our website is largely being done at a JavaScript level within our engine that creates the SWF file. With JavaScript, you can use autoscript to control SWF files, but in order to create effects such as a pan and zoom, is that the person has to understand matrix transformation, Macromedia’s arcane documentation, floating point arithmetic and be a half-decent programmer to do something that is pretty basic."

"We’ve made the process of creating a pan and zoom animation as easy as possible. One of the main concepts of the product is that our model is different than using Flash. Of course, you can do this all within Macromedia Flash 5, but the problem you run into is that you’re animating to a stage, not to a camera or to a user’s eye. What we’ve attempted here is to animate a professional animation camera stand."