Creating a flickering light in Xara

Hello,

I have quite a few questions for y'all.

I was wondering if anyone knew how to create a flickering light on a Xara page, similar to the light on http://www.bottlebellphotography.com/. I wouldn't want the long intro; I just want the part of the flickering light. Any ideas? Do I HAVE to use flash? Also, is there a way to make an firefly, butterfly, etc move on the page? If I had an image of a pretty insect, could I get it to move from the bottom of the page to the top? If so, how do I do that? Last question, can you change the cursor to something other than an arrow (for everyone who visits the site, not just the person who created it)?

Please reply!!

Thank you all for your time.

Take Care,

Monica

It's Flash. So my guess is the designer created the effect from scratch.

You could always show some chutzpah and e-mail the photographer and ask. :rolleyes:

Hi Monica—

You can use Xara's animation features to create a flickering effect with text or other shape by specifying a very short duration for a frame with a particular brightness, move on to another frame of short duration with a different brightness for the shape, and so on.

Here are some Flash animation guidelines and a video tutorial on basic animation

Changing a cursor on a web page is possible—I've visited web sites where the visitor's cursor changes— but it takes more clever Flash coding (or CSS) than is currently possible in Xara...to the best of my knowledge. For what might be considered Cleverness foe the sake of being clever, I'd advise you to pass on this one.

My Best,

Gary

Try this xar file. It's very similar to the effect you want. To create the flicker just create a black shape over a bitmap (bitmap in this case is in the background layer) name the shape "darkener" and copy the frame and change darkeners transparency. Repeat as often as required. To view the effect go File / Preview Flash. n.b. in the attached xar the darkening shape is named "black"

Nice, example, Egg. I see your timing is 2/10s of a second, usually.

That should give Monica a good head start on the flickering text effect she wants by just following the order and duration you have on the Animation Frame Gallery.

My Best,

Gary

Monica? Monica? Does this work for you?

Egg - Brilliant.

Cheers Gary. I was going to use this effect to recreate your fairly recent neon sign tutorial but as always time is the problem.

Other Gary. Monica is the OP or am I missing your point?

@Egg—

I believe Other Gary is asking where she is, why she hasn't posted again, what with all this great material we've provided for her.

I took a whack at created the sort of "stutter" the photography has with his text, based on your leag, Egg



And you know what? Without bothering to write to the photographer as O.G. suggested, I think that this might be a full-fledged FLV file, a video animation in a Flash wrapper, and not straight vector animation as we can create in Xara. There's noise, and a blur in before the flickering, and I've seen this script done in After Effects and with plug-ins such as ParticleIllusion.

So I think there's a workable solution here, but it might not be what the photographer is running as a very tired, annoying portal to his content online.

My Best,

Gary

Okay, here's a flickering neon sign.

These flickering effects are great, thanks and executable are with so small file sizes

Forgot to attach the xar file

Thanks, Egg! It's a clean, exceptionally self-explanatory example you've gifted the community with.

Hi csehz —

There is some confusion in the content creator’s community over what a Shockwave file is, and whether is it the same as a Flash file. Technically, a SWF is, or should be, a vector-based animation, although you can certainly put a JPEG or other image file in a SWF file using XWD and XDP. A Flash file, the type that Apple decided not to support a few years ago, is commonly used as a “container”, a wrapper for highly-compressed video. But if you have the patience, you could put a video into a SWF file using Xara products, you’d have to have a way to turn the video into individual frames and the resulting file size would make the effort not only masochistic, but ridiculous in saved file size.

Because support for SWF and FLV file formats—specifically for mobile devices—has been on and off for the past few years and MPEG-4 has grown in popularity on the Web, I cannot recommend sticking to only SWF as animation output, even though a vector shape-only animation is fantastically small as you see here (if you’re viewing on a desktop computer!).

I think GIF will be around in the foreseeable future, although it’s large in comparison to SWF file sizes. You just have to know who your audience is, and know what animation file formats their browsers support. Even on the desktop, sometimes “Flash” is not visible on pages because the user’s browser is blocking it, sometimes this is by accident, as a security risk, which has been Apple, Inc.’s reason for not supporting it for as far back as Steve Jobs was aware of the risks with the file format.

By the way, does everyone realize that you can export an animation you create in XWD and XDP to AVI file format with alpha channel transparency? Here’s how you could create an animated title for a video (let’s make it HD here), that you can super over footage with transparency. Now, you need a video editor that “sees” the AVI file as containing transparency; I’ve not seen any entry level programs, but if you or someone you know uses Adobe After Effects or Premiere, these two editors will import AVI footage that has an alpha channel, and interpret this channel as transparency information:

1. Set up your animation from the beginning to 1280 x 720 pixels. This is called 720p high definition, and there are higher resolutions but I want to keep this simple here.

2. Set your frames on the Animation Frame Gallery to a duration of 0.03 seconds, which is equal to 30 frames per second, a common US fps rate for digital video.

3. Create your animation; move text around, for example, “XARA Films Presents…”, for example.

4. Choose File>Export Animation, probably after you previewed your video.

5. In the Export Animation dialog, choose AVI from the Save as Type drop-down list and then click Options.

6. In the Options box, choose Uncompressed from the drop-down list at top, because any compression (“codec”) scheme we have in 2013 for AVI files disallows the saving of an alpha channel, and certainly not the MS Video 1 or Intel compressors offered when the transparency box is unchecked in this dialog.

7. Type 30 in the Frames per second box so the animation frame duration agrees with your exported video. This is called the resolution of the video, and doesn’t do anything to speed up or slow down your video. Generally, it just makes your video choppy or smooth.

8. Check the make background transparent checkbox, the Area to save doesn’t make a difference if you’re going to work with this video in an editor, click Apply and then click Close to get back to the Export dialog box, click Export and then get to editing with your new video clip in an editor that recognizes alpha channels in AVI type video.

Xara 3D will export to AVI also, but the background transparency issue becomes academic: there is no AVI with alpha option in Xara 3D Maker v7, but you could in practice define a solid green background for your animation and then use a video editor’s green screen chromakey feature (if supported) to trim out the background. Alternatively, if you export as a SWF, you’ll have the transparency if you specify it, but then you have to find a utility that can convert the SWF to something easier to work with, such as an AVI or QuickTime video with alpha. After Effects can import a SWF from Xara 3D with transparency, and it’s also $1,000 retail or $50/month to rent.

My Best,

Gary

Gary thanks very much the explanation.

Basically in Xara Designer Pro X my issue is with .avi that can not see a real preview of it. In my old example which is just a button reproduction basically, containing mixed transparency and feather:
- checking it in Flash animation preview of course comes the message that mixed transparency and feather are not supported, so the button appears without those
- checking it in GIF animation preview it is limited because of the colors
- the only real preview is in Web page preview, but that just shows one frame of course

So how someone can preview the whole .avi in Xara?

Attachment 95810

I was not sure where to set that 0,03 duration which you mentioned, I think in this particular example that has different meaning as the layers are coming and the objects are not moving. Probably you meant that if the objects are named and so moved. Here setting 0,03 that is just a very short changing of frames.

Anyway just tried the .avi export and upload to link http://youtu.be/pcSCoeq0dUY, well I waited slightly sharper quality, but maybe just I did something wrong. However tried the dimensions as you proposed so 1280x720 and the .avi type is uncompressed.

Hi csehz—

I've copied this topic over to the Xara Flash area; it's getting off-topic, as poor Monica asked for a flickering text effect several days ago, and this export to AVI topic deserves its own space.

go here for the answer, csehz

If there are more general animation questions, please post them there and I will try to answer some and perhaps others can help!

My Best,

Gary