bitmap background in animation - transparency or color

[GALJohnson]

I have a gif animation based on a bitmap image (actually several variations of that bitmap). I need to make the background of the animation either transparent or a particular color. So far I have not found a way to do either Any help will be gratefully appreciated! Link to graphic below.

http://dspencer.jlaweb.com/

[handrawn]

I've just had a look at the gif - in this case it should not be too difficult I think, with a program that edits gifs - designer will do this

[GALJohnson]

Is there a way to have Xara generate frames between two images for a gif animation as it will do for a flash video?

Also, what if you want to have to different things happening, but at different cycle rates. So for instance I have a gif animation of some gears turning with some text fading in and out. The gear train as it (appears) to turn steps 1/3 tooth with every step. But that text fades in over about 20 frames.

Is this doable in flash, and if so is there a way to get the images back to an animated gif? If there were a way to do what I want and then to display the flash video a frame at a time, I could just copy the frames.

Here is a link to the gear video as it is now set up in a gif animation
http://dspencer.jlaweb.com/

Anne

thanks

[handrawn]

Hi Anne

I have merged your two threads as they are both concerned with the same animation and how to edit it

[gwpriester]

Gears are in gear for me.

You cannot tween with GIF animation, only with Flash. And yes, this would work really well as a Flash animation. Maybe a quarter turn at a time. There is something I am forgetting here in regard to rotation. But I am sure someone will come forward and provide the missing point.

[GALJohnson]

Will flash in Xara allow you to define two separate 'animations' that run at different rates (the gears and the fading in text) in one flash video?

[handrawn]

AFAIK it is not possible to give individual objects their own key frames in designer [there is no timeline] - and the frame rate is fixed [default 24fps]

[GALJohnson]

seems like they ought to be able to set different animations on different layers and merge them. But I have done enough programming to know that 'what seems like' and 'what is' are often only vaguely similar.

My original question was about trying to either get transparency or color into my gif animation. I think because I started with a bitmap so the transparency applies to a Xara layer under the bitmap instead of to the backgroun of the bitmap. Is there a way to make the background color or a particular color in a bitmap transparent, or to change a background color in a bitmap? It would be easy in bitmap editor, but I haven't figure out how to do it in Xara.

[GALJohnson]

Things get stranger - it appears in my website like the maybe 120 pixels on the right side are transparent? I can open the image in paintshop pro and it is considerably larger to the right of the lettering - I checked the size, and made sure that the image size and the div that contain it are not constraining it, and I went into Google Chrome and looked at the 'inspect element' and everything looks fine, except that the right part of the image is the color that I want it to be (and the rest is still white).

Pardon me while I be confused.

[handrawn]

I changed your image in designer

if this is the sort of thing you are after I can tell you how to do it
also this is half the file size of your original - which is bigger than it need be as you have the background repeated in each frame

the transparent pixels to the side may have to do with exporting with the wrong page/drawing size setting

[as far as flash goes - designer is at a basic level]