Can Xara Xtreme(Pro) animate this ?

Hi,

I'm looking for an animation tool to fill a specific need described below.
According to what you know from your software, do you think I can easily do that kind of animations with it?
If well, I'll be glad to spend some time trying it, and any indication on how to do will be welcome.

Thank you very much for your answer.
Kind regards.

Need Description
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I've large diagrams. Too large for a screen. When it fits the screen, the text is too small to be read. It's made with Adobe Illustrator and usually printed on large A3 paper.

I'd like to do small movies/animations that explain the diagram to students.
We usually first show the whole (unreadable) diagram to students. Then we zoom in to a small area, and we stop (explaining something). We move the camera, maybe zooming out a little bit to show another part of the diagram. We stop and explain (voice). And so on.
While we explain, we make some boxes or arrows appear (to be created with your animation tool) to emphasis a line of text or any element of the diagram. When we "move/zoom the camera", these boxes and arrows must move/zoom along as if they where printed on the diagram.

I'm ok if the diagram is exported as a 300dpi bitmap from illustrator, and is considered as one big (4626 x 3300 pixels) flat bitmap image in your tool . It'll probably be difficult to import the adobe illustrator diagram or a pdf version into your animation tool and keep it vectorial.

The typical length of such an animation ranges from 1 to 10 minutes.

The last requirement I have is to enable the students viewing the animation, to control the time execution. For example, making a pause is a must. For example, they use the pause button because our explanation is too fast. They must be able to go a little bit backward and forward. I'm ok if your software can export a good resolution (bitmap) movie (1024 x something) of the animation. Movie players have the needed pause/fw/bw buttons.

John Rizzo
JavaBlackBelt.com

Welcome to TG Forums John.

Fist of all, Talkgraphics is not run by the Xara software company, but rather by a dedicated team of Xara software users/moderators and it's members.
A number of Xara developers do visit the forums on occassion and do respond to posts at times.

Xara Xtreme is able to export Flash animations and animated .gif
There are limitations. The best advice at this time would be to suggest you download a 30 day trial version from the Xara web site and then check the movie tutorials available from Xara and many members:

Eggs tutorials
Xhris's tutorials

I'd say the real answer is probably no on this one.

But I know the software that could do this well and it's free. It's called Wink. It's a screencapture animation program so if you can show the diagram on screen and zoom into it illustrator, you can capture it in wink at various stages, it will create the timeline for you. You can add audio or add your own popup labels to it.

Xara is awesome, but not for what you're wanting to do. Better to use a training tool for training demos.

http://debugmode.com/wink/

Welcome to TG John, I notice that you require voice (which I assume means a narrative). This is beyond Xtremes current swf production. I believe you require Adobe Flash or Swish to do what you require.

Do as Steve suggests, download the months free trial and see if it can fit into your requirements.

EDIT: And as Michael suggests as well.

I think Flash is the tool for the job. Rather more expensive than Xtreme and what you want will have a considerable learning curve before you can achieve it.

Paul

As much as I love xara, this is more in the realm of a good video editor. I know Premiere can do what you ask.

Beside of Swish and Flash -

ProShow Gold or Producer can exactly do what you need.
With Gold you can pan and zoom to every place in you picture (so you need to convert your file, but after that; only the sky is the limit) - and the next ending point of your zoom you have to put into the next slide - more flexiblity gives you Producer but both programs does exactly what you need is here are links to the Program:

http://www.photodex.com/products/proshowgold

and the Youtube video for it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKL_YBzANm4&fmt=22

here to Producer:

http://www.photodex.com/products/producer

here the Youtube video for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxem4JG4xDc&fmt=22

The comparision table for it:

http://www.photodex.com/products/producer/compare.html

If you want to know more, just ask.

Michael

Very interesting, I do kinda the same stuff (mostly i assist running presentations in the background while the speaker talks) - and i do it all in xara, the viewers see the toolbar and the color palette during the presentations ;) Same as you, I use directly Xara to zoom in and out of various regions. I don't require animation in my presentations. But if i would, i would create it in After Effects, render it off as a WMV and use windows media player to play these animations in fullscreen, so users could pause the video using media player.