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