So it's been a while since the last update.

Partly, it was because of the long holiday here in Korea, but mostly because we were all hard at work on some important but tricky improvements.

But now it's here! Alight Motion 1.6 Beta. 

Thanks to all our awesome user for your patience :)

When is the Beta Release?

We've started the release process already. It will roll-out gradually over the next 24 hours (so starting now, more and more registered beta users will receive the update gradually, and it will be available to all users by the end of the day on October 1st).

Why is it a Beta?

We're not 100% sure about some of the fixes, so we're launching this as a beta update first. As usual, if you're using Alight Motion for any critical or important work, you should wait to update until after the beta is finished.

If you want to try out the changes right now and don't mind a small risk of something going wrong, you are welcome to join the beta program.

How do I join the Beta?

If you were already a member of the first beta test group, you'll get the new beta update automatically (or you can update in the Play Store app).

If you were not already a member of the beta test group, follow these instructions to join the beta program.

What's new?

Tiles Effect Fixed

All those pesky problems in the "Tiles" effect have been fixed. Tiles work correctly in all project aspect ratios (not just square), the gaps between tiles are gone when rotating, and those ugly streaks or lines that appear when the tile is near the edge of the screen have also been fixed.

There are a few caveats: If you use a very large Skew on a layer, there will still be gaps (this is due to a technical limitation that's hard to fix). Also, if you put the original layer very far off the screen you can still get streaks. However, both of these are unusual use cases and shouldn't cause too many problems.

Copy & Paste Colors

A minor but handy change, you can now copy and paste HTML-style color codes, like "#FFAA00" (including from other apps) by long-pressing anywhere a color code appears in Alight Motion.

Move or Extend to Playhead

There are now shortcut buttons, when you have scrolled past the start or end of a clip, to extend or move the clip to the current playhead location.

Performance Improvements (Less lag!)

We've been working really hard to improve overall app performance, such as making the project list load faster, and reducing lag when working with video.

However, some of the other fixed (like the tile effect fix mentioned above) may have a small negative performance impact.

So we've added a new setting, "Low Quality Preview" 

If you're still experiencing editing lag after this update, try turning on this setting. It slightly reduces the preview resolution on the editing screen (export/share quality is not affected) while at the same time greatly improving preview performance.

If you're still experiencing any lag after this update, try turning on this option.

Audio Fixes

We think we found the audio problem that's been causing broken audio sound on certain phones. We can't test on all phones, so if you still have broken audio after this update, please get in touch with us at support@alightmotion.com.

Other Bug Fixes

We've been hard at work fixing other bugs and crashes reported from our users—overall stability should be much improved in this update.

New Effects

Alight Motion 1.6 comes with five new effects!

Updated Effects

We have improved several existing effects. Besides the "Tiles" effect mentioned above, the following effects were also changed:

• Clouds — Added Stretch and Seed parameters
• Directional Blur — Works better near screen edges, and Angle parameter now works correctly on non-square layers (the blur is no longer "squished").
• Stretch Axis — Now supports a larger range of Scale values
• Exposure / Gamma — Now supports a larger range of Offset values

What about other features, like 3D flips, animated charts, cropping, spline animation, audio wave display, video speed control, and free cake.

Well, we don't know anything about any "free cake" (honest! I paid for this cake I'm eating...)

But we are hard at work on those other popular requests. We take our customer requests very seriously, and read ALL of them, even if it takes us time to respond.

We're working hard and even more updates are on the way. Rest assured, if you've asked, we've heard you :)

If you have any additional feature requests, suggestions, feedback about the beta, bug reports, complaints, or free cake (yum!) to send us, feel free to drop us an e-mail any time at support@alightmotion.com.

(Yes, we know you can't send cake by email...)