Hello. I've just joined this forum. I am an enthusiastic graphic novice and I have owned and enjoyed many versions of XARA. Currently on Photo & Graphic Designer 7. I mainly use Xara for simple web / presentation graphics and particularly for titling or various stills required in my video production business.

I recently wanted to make a (Xara project) animation that would work as a video overlay that emulated the viewfinder of a camcorder. Very simple, only needed 2 still images (i.e 2 frames in the animation), as I needed the little red dot in the corner to flash as it does to indicate "record" in a camcorder.

No problem in building he images/ animation, however, I needed a transparent background (as this was a video overlay). I selected to export the animation as an AVI and I made sure that I checked the "make background transparent" radio button in the "export animation" settings. Unfortunately, the result was an AVI that had an opaque black background. (I managed to use this as I imported it into my video software and then keyed out the black, but this is not ideal).

If anyone can follow my ramblings above and has a few minutes spare, I would welcome any feedback as to whether this is reproduceable on other's system, as it has me stumped and I cannot see any remaining options that I should explore. I'm wondering if there is some problem with the codecs that are coming into play in exporting the AVI.

Help would be appreciated - even if it is simply advising that I'm not going mad.

Thanks.

Duncan