Small change, need to update every frame?

Animation:

I have a 600x800 web page that floats in from the right.

|......|xxxx
|...xx|xx
|..xxx|x
|xxxx|

The first frame zooms in real quick, then it slowly comes to slow down at the 98% stage to gently get to 100%.

This is the effect I'm after:

http://www.mimmoandnaz.com/mimmo+naz...iographies.htm

My questions are twofold:

The content is a smattering of xara text and xara pictures, like 5-10 items ( depending on the page) It floats in on _level2 when triggered by a "menu item" link.

I group the items, then I name the group, then I place the group at different places on the 4 frames I have to make it zoom in.

My problem is that when I see a spelling mistake in retrospect, or if I need to change one of the photos, I guess I need to go through each frame and change the item by CTRL-clicking inside the group, or I have to ungroup, change the spelling of something, then regroup, and then do that in the next frames, etc. My problem is workflow. If I have many more web pages, or many more frames in one "web page" animation that floats in, I have to make these simple changes many times in each frame. Is there some workflow thing I'm missing to propogate a change in text or a picture in one frame to the other frames? Should I be making a bitmap copy of the scene, and then taking that one item, naming it, and then dropping that through all the frames? At least the new bitmap drag would quickly inject that into each scene, and there would be no real piecemeal editing involved...

Anyway, so that's question one.

Question two is, how do I make the frame stop more smoothly like on the page I referenced above? I think I need some sort of parabolic slowing down, and I'm not properly expressing it in my frame intervals and times. ( attached)

Thanks for any ideas.

Take all the items that will come into the frame and group them together as a movieclip. You can then animate the movieclip with a tween and will only have to edit changes once within the movieclip.

See the attached fla for an example. I couldn't load the site on your link (I did later, but the site has problems).

Paul

Thanks for replying. I'm afraid I dont understand. I'm using Xara Pro, not Adobe Flash, and I can't open your fla file. Are you referring to Adobe when you talk about grouping together as a movie clip?

PS: the site works fine usually, but is indeed having a problem at the moment. Might wish to try later. 1st time it froze on me.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tallis

Thanks for replying. I'm afraid I dont understand. I'm using Xara Pro, not Adobe Flash, and I can't open your fla file. Are you referring to Adobe when you talk about grouping together as a movie clip?

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Yes, I apologise. What was I thinking about?! I was thinking Flash not Extreme!
My example is totally irrelevant to Xtreme.

Quote:

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PS: the site works fine usually, but is indeed having a problem at the moment. Might wish to try later. 1st time it froze on me.

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I did get it to load but it's terribly slow. There are plenty of other sites doing similar things (more efficiently).

Back to your question. If you animate in keyframes (layers in Xara) then inevitably you will have to propagate changes by hand on every keyframe.

I suspect that cut and paste will help you no end.

Your example highlights that while Xtreme can be used to animate in Flash it isn't necessarily the best way. I expect that your file sizes will be bigger than a native flash solution too.

Hope that might help a tiny bit.

Paul

"I suspect that cut and paste will help you no end."

If I make a change, then copy it, is there a way to paste in relative absolute position on the next frame? ( If you know what I mean ). Kind of like paste in place, but relative to the next ( shoved over a bit ) frame?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tallis

"I suspect that cut and paste will help you no end."

If I make a change, then copy it, is there a way to paste in relative absolute position on the next frame? ( If you know what I mean ). Kind of like paste in place, but relative to the next ( shoved over a bit ) frame?

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No, but you can explicitly set the position of things - look in the toolbar for the x and y position. If you have ten things to animate together (as per the example you gave), group them, give the group a name and animate that. Should be simple to recreate the whole animation without cut and past.

Paul

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tallis

If I make a change, then copy it, is there a way to paste in relative absolute position on the next frame? ( If you know what I mean ). Kind of like paste in place, but relative to the next ( shoved over a bit ) frame?

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It's no problem to insert a object on the same position on the next frame:

1. Select your object on the last frame and press CTRL+C
2. Move to the next frame and insert the shape with CTRL+Shift+V

But that's all.

Regards,
Remi

Or you can use the "Duplication distance":

1. Set the "Duplication distance" (Menu "Utilities" -> "Options..." -> "Duplication distance")
2. Select your shape and create a duplicate (CTRL+D)
3. Cut the object with CTRL+X
4. Insert the object with CTRL+Shift+V into your next frame

Remi

Well, I meant the same relative absolute position. It's the same position in the moving rectangle that I'm zooming in. It's not the same absolute position because the recangle is moving on the X axis in the - direction.

"S" is a spelling mistake in the 600x800 rectangle. The lines are 4 frames in the animation. They are always identical, except for position. I want it "zoomed" or slid in.

|.....|xxsx
|..xx|sx
|.xxs|x
|xxsx|

the items xxsx are grouped and then named.

I see the spelling mistake "s".

I change it. Then I need to go to frame 2, ungroup, change, regroup it.

Then I have to rename everything, or rather rename the regrouped 1st frame items, then re-copy them to the next frame... what?

I feel like I have to redo the whole (simple but still tedious) animation every time there is one change.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tallis

Well, I meant the same relative absolute position. It's the same position in the moving rectangle that I'm zooming in. It's not the same absolute position because the recangle is moving on the X axis in the - direction.

"S" is a spelling mistake in the 600x800 rectangle. The lines are 4 frames in the animation. They are always identical, except for position. I want it "zoomed" or slid in.

|.....|xxsx
|..xx|sx
|.xxs|x
|xxsx|

the items xxsx are grouped and then named.

I see the spelling mistake "s".

I change it. Then I need to go to frame 2, ungroup, change, regroup it.

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Why can't you just copy the corrected group then paste it into the second frame and adjust it?

Quote:

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I feel like I have to redo the whole (simple but still tedious) animation every time there is one change.

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Xtreme gives you the ability to do these things, though there are other packages that do it much better. Be glad you can do it at all in Xtreme.

I can't help but think you're making this a bigger thing than it needs to be.

Paul

Perhaps you can create a Autohotkey script for your task. Apart from that you can ask the Xara developers if there are plans to implement a scripting solution within Xara Xtreme. I never received a serious answer from them about that (only the "impression", that they are not willing/able to develop such a feature)...

Remi

"Why can't you just copy the corrected group then paste it into the second frame and adjust it?"

This is my question. If I see errors, or need to make adjustments, and I have several frames that form the animation, I need to adjust each and every frame to make one small change. My question was oriented towards optimizing this tedious propogation workflow by seeing if there is an easier way that I'm missing...

"I can't help but think you're making this a bigger thing than it needs to be."

Just trying to understand the dynamics of how Xara animations and naming items or groups to tween can be done efficiently is all.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tallis

My question was oriented towards optimizing this tedious propagation workflow by seeing if there is an easier way that I'm missing...

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Yes, it is tedious and it's more tedious because Xara have missed a very simple trick (from another perspective we could argue it's a bug).

Currently, for example, if you edit a group "g1" in the first frame, you need to do exactly the same thing in every other frame (or cut and paste as per my advice).

The trick that Xara missed was that if ,for example ,you edit group "g1" in the first frame, Xtreme should replace all other occurrences of "g1" in the other frames with the changed version. This would make you (and many others I imagine) very happy.

(Wicked comment: If it's any consolation, this is how the Flash environment does it)

Quote:

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"I can't help but think you're making this a bigger thing than it needs to be."

Just trying to understand the dynamics of how Xara animations and naming items or groups to tween can be done efficiently is all.

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Yes, there is going to be some tedium using Xtreme for animation.

It's really good that it does it at all - it's a recent addition - some people are doing some fun stuff with it. It's no competition for the Flash tool though.

My confession is that I don't use Xtreme for animation.

Paul

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tallis

Question two is, how do I make the frame stop more smoothly like on the page I referenced above? I think I need some sort of parabolic slowing down, and I'm not properly expressing it in my frame intervals and times.

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I just looked at the Xara Flash tutorial 2 and turned out there is a way to do this. You need to put "<:", ">:", "<>:" or "><:" in the beginning of the name of the object you want to animate, and it will ease in/out the frames. So you'll only need a single frame to animate, which is easier to manage.

See the tutorial for more details.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Skaven252

I just looked at the Xara Flash tutorial 2 and turned out there is a way to do this. You need to put "<:", ">:", "<>:" or "><:" in the beginning of the name of the object you want to animate, and it will ease in/out the frames. So you'll only need a single frame to animate, which is easier to manage.

See the tutorial for more details.

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I'll be updating that tutorial soon; there are a few other features you can use: using the command "<X:name" where X is a number from 1-9 will determine the profile of the acceleration. Lower X values are gentler accelerations; higher numbers are more harsh.

Skaven- thanks! wow, reading compresension... i read the same tutorial and somehow missed that section...

Xhris- thanks! waiting for the update... you should set up a micropayment button on your website to collect some donations to you when people find your tuts helpful-- i cant imagine when you find the time to do these, but i'm not complaining!!

I will look into the < & > stuff. From 1st glance, then, it doesnt even seem like tweening or animation in the frame-to-frame sense... With these commands, the name gallery handles it all for that one frame.

Are there any more "unpublished" commands like this!!?? :o

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tallis

Are there any more "unpublished" commands like this!!?? :o

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It's all well documented within the Xara Xtreme Pro manuals, delivered in a printed form with Xara Xtreme Pro (chapter "Flash Animations", page 23ff).

Remi

Quote:

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Originally Posted by remi

It's all well documented within the Xara Xtreme Pro manuals, delivered in a printed form with Xara Xtreme Pro (chapter "Flash Animations", page 23ff).

Remi

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LOL - I thought manuals were just for putting on the shelf..

Quote:

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Originally Posted by remi

It's all well documented within the Xara Xtreme Pro manuals, delivered in a printed form with Xara Xtreme Pro (chapter "Flash Animations", page 23ff).

Remi

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In fairness, that acceleration profile command was sneaked into the documentation without anyone being told. Just like the shift-override drag drop feature to revert to the old dropping rules.

Thanks. I'm just used to many of these "epiphanies" being from "tricks of the trade" and not necessarily from a manual, esp. with Xara and its habit of frequently having 2-3 different ways to do any one particular thing...

Skaven:

"So you'll only need a single frame to animate, which is easier to manage."

I can't get this to work, it appears that you do in fact need at least two frames, the <> just let you have more fine control over the tween. Please correct me if I'm wrong.