Re: Lyric as an animation tool - An Artist perspective...

I'll expand a bit on what Erik said with my experience with Lyric... It's the worst piece of crap I've ever worked on. Unfortunately, it's also the 'industry standard' so stations are forced to deal with it. It's buggy, clunky, completely non-intuitive and poorly designed. Basically, it's the antithesis of After Effects. It usually takes me 10 times longer to create an animation in Lyric than it does in After Effects - and because of the tools, it won't look nearly as good. There are bugs that they've been promising to fix 'in the next upgrade' since we've been using it (well over a year now), that still haven't been addressed. I swear this machine has taken 5 years off my life.

You'll end up creating all the elements in Photoshop and After Effects (and a 3D program) anyway and exporting them out to Chyron. Ideally, Adobe should make their own real-time on-air system, based on their desktop products. But they don't, and there's no real way to play real-time, updatable animation on-air so we're left with Chyron and Vizrt (I don't know how good/bad Vizrt is). Lyric is based on some really clever ideas, updated messages, persistent pages, real-time 3D... Unfortunately, there's a pig wrapped around it.

kurt murphy