Animated GIF Problems

[Jimi King]

I'm a Xara animated GIF virgin (just bought a new PC and the old software I used to use for animated GIFs doesn't work with Vista).

So, I have opened a blank animation document and pasted the objects I want to use into it. My problem is that it's clear you have to set the page size to the export size and the pasted documents land off the page. When I reposition them It's fine but even if I re-copy and paste them for subsequent frames they still end up off the page.

Do I have to redraw everything to get it all in place or am I missing something obvious here?

I've tried it in both V5 and V4. Same deal.

[steve.ledger]

Make use of the 'Copy frame' button in the frame gallery and use 'paste in place' (Ctrl+SHIFT+V) to copy objects from one frame to another and have them land in the same spot Jimi.

Have I understood you correctly?

[Jimi King]

Thanks Sledger. I've done it the long winded way now, but I'll remember that for next time.

I'm pleased with the file size of the resulting file. The overlay option helped a lot. My previous software was one whole pic at a time.

[Jimi King]

Still having a few problems creating these little blighters.

And little being the keyword here. Usually when I'm doing animated GIFs they tend to be fairly small (buttons etc). Assuming that I need to make the page size the size of the object concerned, it would seem that my object is often smaller than the minimum page size that Xtreme allows.

Again, am I missing something obvious?

[a4hire]

Are you still having problems with pasting objects ? If you have the object you want in place in one frame, then you just copy the frame and it will be in the the same place in the new frame.

[handrawn]

if you export your animation from xtreme as a gif, the size will be the size of your object boundary [as if they were all grouped] - not your page size

thinking about it, AFAIK the page only is useful if you are composing/exporting frames as stills, when you have the usual options

[handrawn]

not quite that simple - the page is a maximum boundary - no problem if your animation is smaller..

[Jimi King]

Just played around some more and I seem to be able to export and the resulting GIF is the size of all the objects. Which is fine as long as the background object is white (i.e. the same as the page colour) otherwise it doesn't work out to well, as checking the transpaency box doesn't seem to be working for me.

[BobInce]

Which is fine as long as the background object is white (i.e. the same as the page colour) otherwise it doesn't work out to well, as checking the transpaency box doesn't seem to be working for me.

I don't know if this is the same problem, but if I set the ‘background transparent’ option it composes everything against white instead of whatever colour I had set as background. Sometimes it appears to change the background colour to white on-screen to reflect this, sometimes not. (And sometimes it changes in the middle of a redraw — cacheing problem maybe?)

I've always had to post-process in another tool to make Xtreme's animated GIF export with transparency anti-aliased into a non-white background; if there's a ‘real’ way to do it I'd be interested to know. Non-animated GIF export is unaffected.

(And I too would like to be able to create documents smaller than the current seemingly-arbitrary ‘minimum size’, which is often larger than the simple animated icons I'm intended to produce.)

[Jimi King]

Well thanks Bob. At least it's not just me.

The ability to overlay objects makes Xtreme potentially great at producing smaller files, but the luxury of being able to export a transparency created against a coloured background (to eliminate jagged edges) would really make it usable.