Alight Motion Production Release (v1.1.0)

So there's this big scary button on the Google Play Developer Console, and today we clicked it:

Yes, it's official: the first production release of Alight Motion is in roll-out on Google Play. It can take a few hours before the update becomes available for everyone on Google Play, so if you don't see it yet, be patient.  It should be available to everyone by the end of the day on August 6, 2018, Seoul (KST) time.

A huge, huge shout-out to our awesome early beta testers who helped make this possible. If you were an early beta tester (registered your account before August 5th, 2018) we're doing something special for you. You can find details here (be sure to scroll down).

What's new in this version?

There aren't many new features in this update. We have been mostly focusing on stability. We believe we have fixed most of the major issues at this point, but will be monitoring closely after the release in case we need to issue a patch.

That said, there are a few new adjustments:

• The three most recently used audio tracks are now show at the beginning of the audio mini-browser. This is particularly handy if you use a lot of short sound effects like swooshes and pops with your motion graphics. You can see a small watch icon for recent tracks:
  
  
  
  
• A new My Account menu has been added to the side menu on the project list screen, so you can check your Alight Motion membership status.
  
  
  
  

What's coming in future updates? Are there more effects coming?

We have a policy of generally not discussing specific features for upcoming releases, because during internal testing, we might find that some feature doesn't work as well as we expected, and we might decide to spend more time developing it before release.

However, we do plan to release frequent updates with both bug fixes and new features and new effects. We've heard your feedback, and rest assured, improvements are on the way!

What if I'm still having crashes or export problems?

We monitor the number of crash-free users, and we believe that this release should be stable enough that 95% of our users won't experience any crashes. Over the coming weeks, we hope to be able to get that to more than 99%.

However, we are a small team, and when it comes to video editing, there are a LOT of factors that come into play: The way the video is encoded (H.265? HEVC? audio format? container format? frame rate? resolution?) is one factor; the exceptionally wide variety of Android devices on the market is another factor, especially and video encoding and decoding support varies wildly among different devices (we don't have the budget to buy thousands of devices for testing).

So, if you're one of the unlucky 5% (or later hopefully, less-than-1%) of users still experiencing problems, we're deeply sorry, and rest assured that we're working very very hard to remedy the situation.

If you are experiencing crashes ("Alight Motion has stopped" popup, or just getting kicked out to the phone's home screen) the data about those crashes is sent to us anonymously. We're already hard at work solving those problems. Keep an eye out for future updates; we fix several more crashes with every release. But...

If you can reliably reproduce a crash; that is, if you can start from an empty project and follow a specific set of steps that make the app crash every time, please let us know at support@alightmotion.com. This kind of information in addition to the anonymous crash reports is extremely helpful in helping us fix the problem faster.

If you are experiencing ANR ("Alight Motion isn't responding") if there is a "Report" button, please use it to send a report (if there is no report button, you may have a newer phone that sends the report automatically; in which case don't worry about it). As with crashes, we're working hard to fix these.

If you have an export problem please e-mail us at support@alightmotion.com. Please be sure to include as much of the following information as possible (the more you can provide, the better we can help):

• The version of Alight Motion you are using
• The phone you are using (manufacturer and exact model)
• The version of Android OS installed on your phone
• As much information as you can about the project that won't export:
  • What resolution is the project?
  • What are the most video clips you have at one time in the project?
  • Are the video clips used in the project recorded on your phone or downloaded from the Internet?
  • What format (resolution, etc.) are the video clips used in the project?
• Please describe what goes wrong (does the export get stuck? does it finish normally but the exported video doesn't play or is broken in some way? Is there an error message or error number displayed?)

If you have another problem: please e-mail us at support@alightmotion.com. Please give us as much detail as you can about the problem. If you have trouble explaining, feel free to include screenshots. The more detail you provide, the better the chances are that we can help.