looking for a way to animate 16 png files, crop too, swiftly in Xara designer

[mintintegral18]

this gif animation should show there is a lot of white space I would like to crop. I CTRL mouse dragged each inserted image to the RIGHT, and eyeballed the vertical position. let me try inserting this gif in next comment.

[Egg Bramhill]

mintintergal,
Firstly how are you producing these images (screen-grabs)?
can you attach your .web or .xar file?

[Egg Bramhill]

Managed to download your very small animation animation. Unfortunately too small to really work on but here's a couple of sugestions re cropping & white space reduction:

[mintintegral18]

thanks. windows key print-screen, then paste to windows Paint, save as PNG. fyi, Windows G saves png screen shots one step faster.

[handrawn]

why are you pasting to windows paint and not directly into a xara document [from which you can also save as PNG, with a keyboard shortcut, if you need the grabs as seperate image files]

I would agree with egg - prepare your images in an editor document, not an animation one; in xara at least it is a better workflow

[mintintegral18]

Hi Egg, You made a fantastic New Animation (process) of size 360 x 185. My cropping resulted in 1465 x 784 file exported to new png files. Thanks again.

1. I am stuck snapping extra white space after pasting (or after Insert menu, Image from file..)
2. How can I then snap to bottom right (if page options are 1464 or something large)?

Let me suggest:
Is it because there is a default 480px margin in the Page Options size?
Is there a setting to tell Xara paste to Not shrink the pasted image?
It seems anything under 500 px and the process works with snapping to top Left.
It does seem like Zara snaps if I mouse drag, but is too granular, and the slightest pixel off, messes up my animation.

screen shots

[handrawn]

Is there a setting to tell Xara paste to Not shrink the pasted image?
It seems anything under 500 px and the process works with snapping to top Left.

go to xara utilities menu > options > view tab

if 'resize large imported photos down to....' is selected change this to the 'import at the dpi specified in the image file' option

this will probably fix the resize issue on import/paste

[handrawn]

It does seem like Zara snaps if I mouse drag, but is too granular, and the slightest pixel off, messes up my animation.

you could try using the positon settings on the selector tool infobar to force selected image[s] to a fixed position relative to 0x,0y

[mintintegral18]

attaching one Windows zipped file of two Xara projects. the second project has the cropping part complete, so you can probably ignore the first one. 4.14MB

[handrawn]

egg is an expert in xara animation, I am not, I use another program, but one cardinal rule I will never deviate from is 'always work in whole pixels' - your final animation is going to be sized in whole pixels, so you must make sure you crop your images to whole pixels and in the correct aspect ratio

obviously, if the image[s] you are using are not in the same aspect ratio as your final video size you will need to have white space either in x or y; if you are making an animation that is not a standard video size maybe not, but you must still have your images in whole pixels

your screen capture should be in whole pixels and you should keep it that way - if somewhere along the way, either by cropping or whatever, your image has one dimension that is in pixel fractions you are going to have to either remake it, or, pad it to whole pixels by placing it over a white rectangle of the correct whole pixels size and making a bitmap copy [thereby introducing some white space], or recropping it at a whole pixel size [thereby losing a small part of it]

this is particularly important in xara whose reporting of image size is only as accurate as the number of decimal points your windows OS is set to; a small variation can completely throw an animation, as you noted earlier....