Changes to Alight Motion Project Package Sharing (Fall 2020)

Having trouble importing Project Packages (aka Alight Links or “Presets”)?  We recently made some important changes to ease the burden on our infrastructure and reduce your data costs when importing projects. Read on to learn about how these changes affect you and what you can do about it if you are experiencing any rough spots due to the change.

Updated required! The most important change is that the new system requires at least Alight Motion 3.4.3 to work. If you’re getting any link verification errors or failures when uploading packages, make sure you have updated to Alight Motion 3.4.3 or newer.

Have an Alight Motion Membership? You won’t notice any major differences. You can continue to use and share links as normal. However, if you are making project package links to be shared publicly, you should be aware that large project packages (over 5MB) can only be imported by members, so consider planning them so they are usable by everyone, not just members. Here are some tips:

• Avoid packages with lots of projects. Five packages with three projects each is better than one package with 15 projects.
  
  
• Prefer images to video, and keep them small. If you’re making a preset, your users will be swapping out the media anyway, so no need to use full-resolution DSLR images.
  
  
• When uploading, look out for the “Large Project” and “Large Project (Members only)” warnings. “Large Project” means that non-members can only get the optimized version of the project, and “Large Project (Members only)” means only members can download the project. If you see these, consider making adjustments.

Don’t have an Alight Motion Membership? (Read this if you’re using the app for free) 

• We have placed a 5MB download limit on project packages for free users. Don’t panic! You still have options. Read on!\
• Are you an evil mega-corporation trying to take our money from us? Not at all! Quite the opposite, in fact: We’re a small team working hard to make Alight Motion, and server bandwidth is expensive. By limiting the download size, it reduces our costs and allows us to keep the service free for you!
  
  
• Can I still download packages that are bigger than 5MB?  Glad you asked! Yes you can! We’ve been hard at work, and we made a new service that automatically makes an optimized version of existing project packages so (for most packages) you can keep using them. If a package is too large, you’ll be offered the option to download the optimized version automatically. Better yet, this saves you money because it uses less of your precious cellular data when you download a project.

• Are all packages available in optimized form? Unfortunately not. There are a few kinds of project packages that we can’t optimize. In this case you should contact the creator because they can re-share the package in a form you can download!
  
  
• Does package optimization affect visual quality?  Yes. A little. We noticed that a lot of packages are needlessly large (for example 1080p projects with 4k photos). The optimization process reduces images to a resolution closer to the actual project resolution. For most projects, you won’t see a significant difference, but technically yes, the images are smaller after optimization. For preset and template projects, you’ll be swapping out placeholder images for your own content anyway, so the quality of the images you’re throwing away doesn’t matter (and by reducing it, we save you data costs!)
  

It is our sincere hope that these changes let us continue to provide the service for free, while still letting you download your important links (and reducing your data usage in the process!) However, we realize this might be a rough transition for some people. If you run into any trouble, please reach out to us at support@alightmotion.com. While we can’t afford to open up link sharing without any limits except to paying users, we promise to work with our awesome community (that means you!) to continue to fine-tune the system to make it as seamless as possible for everyone. As always, thank you for using Alight Motion!