Web Construction

[Bob C.]

In an attempt to get familar with XaraX I did a remake of an animation done in CorelDraw’s PhotoPaint. It took about 10% of the original time using XaraX, a remakable difference and was fun to do!.

The file size, however, did balloon on export to the animated GIF. It was only 33 KB in XaraX and it blows up to 156 KB when exported!

Sorry for the big file!

Bob C.

[This message was edited by Bob C. on May 07, 2001 at 09:29 AM.]

[jens g.r. benthien]

Bob,

screeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaammmmm. That's the best animated gif I've ever seen. Superb. Fantastic. I ** LOVE ** it. Where did you get the idea for it?

jens

[Bob C.]

Thanks for your kind comment jens.

Where did it come from? I donno! I have been enjoying your creative posts here for some time now, the latest being your salt and pepper images. Seems to me you have very little trouble getting the creative juices to flow!

I have always enjoyed understanding how things work and explaining what I see. I guess that is one thing “art� can do. It is a great advantage to be able to add (XaraX) motion to the mix as well.

I’m very excited about using a vector program to do animation’s! I hope the ballooning file size issue can be fixed!

Bob C.

[gwpriester]

What's really cool, aside from the animation itself, is the images are so simple and small, that even if the file size is unweildy, the images load as if in real time. Streaming GIFs.

Marcus Geduld, who used to be a regular in the old i/us Xara Conference did some really crazy small animations in Xara 2.

You can see some of Marcus's animations in the September 1999 Featured Artist Gallery

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Rarely So Humble...

[Bob C.]

Gary, thanks for pointing me to Marcus's animations! I remember laughing at his Alien
Pit Stop animation but don’t remember the others. Memory leak I guess!

I will check his Web page too! Hope he is still involved?

Bob Centamore

[Trekart]

I had a quick play around to see if I could reduce the size of the file in anyway while still making it acceptable quality.

I managed to get it down to 99428 bytes, and hopefully it still conveys the original animation quality!

Stu.

[Bob C.]

Stu

Thanks for the effort to reduce the file size by about 1/3. It still has about the same
general overall impression I was aiming for when I created it. It appears you have removed several frames (about a 33% of them) ;-)

Of course I wanted to add more frames to the animation and did some trimming of my own before uploading. The subtle differences are, IMHO, what can make a very large difference on the impact an animation can have.

The 300KB file limit here is a limitation I don’t have if I dump the file to tape.

The advantage of using animation to convey my view of the world is adding motion to the mix, the disadvantage is the file size the motion adds.

Bob C.

[dood]

Bob, I like it! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

I saved the animation and took it into Animation Shop from Jasc. It was able to optimize it down to 52K and that was on the highest quality settings.

Here's two others that I did (sorry they are not XX related yet.) [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]


20K


42K

I'm going to have to check out that tutorial on doing animations in XX!

-Troy

[Bob C.]

Thanks Troy,

I like your VW driveby anim and both are bitmap animation’s!

Interesting that you were able to get it to that file size for the Web Const. anim. I was able to get it to 46K exporting from XaraX but it played choppy as yours does now.
Starts off at the proper rate then sloooows down!

So I had to adjust the settings in Xara(Transparency vs no transparency) to get it to
play smoothly on export!

Bob C.

[dood]

Hi Bob,

Thanks, those two bitmap animations were fun to make.

Choppy? Hmmm, not sure I know what you mean. Here are both images side by side. On my system they appear in sync when viewed side by side (from a local page on my system). [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] They are out of sync when loading from the forum because of the different sizes, the smaller one starts sooner.

Sincerely,
-Troy