Transparency and animated GIFs

[pduggan]

Having just failed to anti-alias a transparent animated GIF to a grey page colour, can anyone confirm whether or not there's a problem here? I checked my settings several times, it came out transparent alright, but always anti-aliased to white!

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

PS Been searching and sifting through old postings because I knew I'd seen some stuff on transparency and animated GIFs, but haven't found an answer to my question!

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on March 18, 2001 at 07:09 AM.]

[pduggan]

Having just failed to anti-alias a transparent animated GIF to a grey page colour, can anyone confirm whether or not there's a problem here? I checked my settings several times, it came out transparent alright, but always anti-aliased to white!

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

PS Been searching and sifting through old postings because I knew I'd seen some stuff on transparency and animated GIFs, but haven't found an answer to my question!

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on March 18, 2001 at 07:09 AM.]

[jens g.r. benthien]

Peter,

yes, I'm having the same problem. It must be related to another one:

If you develop a tiny animation (without the animation developer in XARA), that means if you create one bitmap copy for every frame with the setting 256 colors, transparency OFF, and you click all your bitmaps in the bitmap gallery, -> SAVE and save it as an animated bitmap, ALL colors in the final animation are GONE.

And then, when you try the same thing with transparency turned ON, well, the result is frustrating.

I loved this little feature in X 2.0 for some cheap and cheerful animated buttons, but now I have to use the animation module which is far more complicated because it does not offer the full control as the standard workspace.

OK, it's not that important, but it would be nice if XARA could fix this issue with the next update...

jens

[Mark Goodall]

Peter

There is a problem in 1.0c when using page backgrounds for animated GIFs. Incorrect anti-aliasing will occur. There is a user workaround which completely fixes this problem.
In the frame gallery there is an option to select all frames, this is the button with the mouse pointer, depress this prior to the export of the animated GIF.

Xara will provide a download patch to fix this problem within 2 weeks.

Mark Goodall
Xara Ltd

[Mark Goodall]

Actually the user workaround may not work in this case. The patch will provide a fix.

Mark Goodall
Xara Ltd

[pduggan]

Thanks for that, Mark. I'm sure I normally export my animated GIFs with all frames selected anyway, so I'd probably have noticed if it made a difference. (Not at home right now, so I can't check till later.)

Any news on the file size thing for animations? (John Richardson did tell me some time ago that you'd identified a problem here, but I've heard nothing since.)

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>