October 2014 Tips and Tricks - Big GIFs, Tiny Animations

[Gare]

Is there really a difference if the background object comes foreground object and the background object/objects are the ones that are animated instead? Honestly I can see no reason why it could not be done in Xara or any other software as there are afterall only different images stacked on top of each other.

Yes, there really is a difference in Xara as to how shapes are assigned a Background or an Overlay tag, Theinonen, even though I've twisted your question slightly because you're talking about layer order, which has a visual effect of course, but nothing to do with options in programs that can help reduce file size and optimze their appearance. Animated GIFs have had the same options for repeating pixels or laying the same ones onto the next frame, since it was discovered that the GIF file format can do this.

It has to do with Xara's capability to tag a successive frame so that only the pixels in the frame that are different from the previous frame are added to the overall GIF file. CorelDRAW can do this, Photoshop can do this, many cottage industry programs can do this, Microsoft Word cannot do this.


-g