Animated Gif

I have been working on some graphics for my work and I am now working on the Christmas card. They want it animated to send out to customers, but I am questioning if I am doing some things correct especially the B and O in the frame pallet. If I make one image the background, and I make the others overlays, will the background image show through and the overlay is simply the added graphic? I would assume this reduces the gif animation by quite a bit if this is the case. Instead of redrawing the image several times it would simply show the background and the particular overlay. Is this correct? I am under a time crunch, but I searched through the forum real quick and I didn't come up with anything on this subject, and I have been unable to test this out since coming up with this thought in my head. Any assistance is appreciated.

Hi


from xtreme help [ver 2 - Ver 4 is not so helpful maybe ]:



Frame Gallery - Background and Overlay Settings

Xara Xtreme uses frames to create animated GIF files. Next to the frames listed in the Frame Gallery are two columns of switches. For each frame the left-hand switch indicates whether the frame is a background frame and the right-hand switch whether it overlays earlier frames. The settings of these switches can be changed simply by clicking on them.
Background
If this is set, then the frame covers all previous frames. This is useful if you want to create a background and then build up an animation on top of this background. Often the first frame in the animation is a Background frame.
If the first frame is not a background frame, the Animated GIF uses the page background as its background. In Xara Xtreme you can set up the document background to the same color or bitmap as the final web page. This lets you create bitmaps that blend seamlessly with the web page background. For details see Changing the background section in the help.
Overlay
If this is set, then the frame overlays the previous frame.
Possible values are both off or one option on. Both on is invalid because a Background frame covers earlier frames and so nothing shows through - there is nothing to overlay.
B O
Off Off Render this frame over the current background.
On Off Render this frame on its own, overwriting all previous frames. This frame now becomes the current background and forms the background for all subsequent frames.
Off On Render this frame on top of the previous frame.
Examples
• An animation that shows ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ in sequence on a colored background. This requires four frames. Frame 1 is just the background and has Background on. Frame 2 shows ‘A’ and has both options off. Frames 3 and 4 show ‘B’ and ‘C’ and also have both options off.
• An animation that builds up ‘A’, ‘AB’ ‘ABC’. Frame 1 shows the background and ‘A’ and has Background on. Frame 2 shows ‘B’ and has Overlay on. This overlays the frame over frame 1 and you see ‘AB’. Frame 3 shows ‘C’ and also has Overlay on. Building up an animation in this way is more efficient than making each frame a Background frame. The final animated GIF only needs to store the changes between frames and so frames 2 and 3 require less space than if they were Background frames.
Tip
To make a sequence of frames background or overlay, set the switch for the first frame and Shift-click on switch for the last frame. The background/overlay settings of all the frames in between change too.

Steve,
How come your images don't show on my screen?

those are links in the text of the xtreme ver 2 help Ron - so local to my machine - I guess I should have taken them out - you cannot view them from the web :o

Ok....nuts.

they are links to other help sections which link to other help sections which link to....... well you know how it works

I ll take them out

done

Wow, thanks for the rapid response. That was incredibly helpful too. When I pulled up the help in V4, it did not explain it as well as this. I guess they figure a person should have it figured out by now. Well, now I have some work to do. I must rebuild my gif. I will post the results here. I guess I missed the show submit deadline already. :( Thanks for the help.

animated gif is old hat to some :D - good luck, glad it was helpful

And here it is. That information was monumental to my getting this done. I am pleased with the results. I had hoped for perhaps a bit more, or I had envisioned a little different look in my head rather, but I think it is ok. What I really like is the quality output that Xara allows me to maintain. With other programs, this animation came out to be a large file or was extremely dithered to try to keep the file size smaller. That, I am extremely pleased with. Thanks again for the valuable information.

Here are a couple other static versions for Christmas I presented. They chose the ornaments, but wanted it animated in some way for some bling!! I was also able to change the background quickly and render them out to give them options. I always love working with Xara. Good fast results. I added the extruded bows and ribbons later using the 3D extrude. Fun stuff.

It looks great :)

I used to make lots and lots of animated gifs - in fact that is really why I bought my very first copy of xara X, back in the days before I did any real drawing on a computer, to make gifs and to paste up scanned images into pages
It is a very good tool for the job I think

Thanks for posting it up

Nice Christmas animation Dave!

I like all those, especially the Christmas tree.........

Thanks for the responses. The Christmas tree was actually the one I preferred, but the other was chosen over it. Perhaps I will just use it as my own animated Christmas card. Hmmm...sounds like I have a project to work on.

Excellent. :)

That's beautiful Dave. Bet that took a lot of work.
Larry

Nice work, Dave. I prefer the white background, but it all looks good.

Thanks, that is quite humbling to get such a response. I prefer the white background too for the static images. When you add the animation to it you can't really see much because of the yellow sparkles against white, so I added the darker background. I tried some others, and the dark red didn't come out too bad, but others didn't look too good. I went ahead and did them anyway just to give them some options to choose from. Here is the dark red background.

Of course you're right about the animtated sparkles not showing well against the white.

I like the warmth of the burgundy background, but I'm not sure about the red text against it. Did you try white text on the burgundy?

Not a bad thought, I will certainly give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

Dave, very impressive work. The most outstanding part of the animation is the sparkling star sequences. Would you mind sharing how you created them?

Thank you for the response and the compliment. Here is the final image. I went with two darker yellow sparkles instead of the brighter yellow. So, I think I am happier with this result. I always liked the white background, and the sparkles stand out a bit more. Here is also the burgundy background with white lettering. That was interesting in itself. The font is scriptina, and it seems to be very narrow and light which I like, but it doesn't show up so well. So I duplicated it on top of itself twice. The bottom two are red and the top duplicate is white. I think it made and interesting effect. Please let me know what you think.

The construction of the gif was a little time consuming. It is a 40 frame animation. I used the base image as my background, and then I added each of the sparkles individually to the frames. The sparkles also fade in and back out, so I set up a grid of different size and shaded sparkles. I would choose a size and then start with number one and add it to a frame. Move to the next frame and add the next sparkle in sequence and align it to the first one using the guide lines. I just kept stepping it through until one particular sparkle had gone through the fade in and out animation. Some of the sparkles have shorter times, so I might start them on three and they would only go through a 9 step process. On each step I would add other sparkles and in each frame following I would move them slightly (one or two pixels) so it gave it a bit of a shimmer and movement effect. I hope all of this makes sense. Here is the images I used for the sparkles and the frame sequence to keep my head straight. Believe me, it didn't always work.

Dave, the white text on burgundy is a bit special. Thanks too for the animated .gif construction details.
Saludos,
Bob.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your technique Dave.

Top job on the animation Dave. Very eye catching, great colours.
Rupert

Looking good on both the white and the burgundy versions, Dave. :) Good move on the layering with the white text.

Something else I noticed in comparing the final versions — the way the angled ribbon end points so nicely to the space between the red portion of the business name and the black portion. It works particularly well in the burgundy version, perhaps because of the tighter visual margin on the left.