Problems exporting animated GIFs

[diniel]

I first saw this problem a couple of weeks ago when using Xara X 1.0b on a client's PC in Windows NT 4.

I created an animation in Xara, and all was well, until I tried to export it. The preview in browser looked OK, but I thought I'd reduce the number of colours.

I did this, and did a new preview. There was a strange mix of what looked like either 16 colour or monochrome frames in the animation - sometimes possibly inverting the colours I had used.

Thinking it was a display driver problem, I saved the file and viewed it on a different machine - but it looked exactly the same.

I saved the Xara X file (converting shadows and bevels to editable shapes) and opened it in CorelXara 2 before exporting .... perfectally. Then I forgot about the problem, though it was never solved.

I have just tried to create another animated GIF, this time on my own PC. I am running Windows 2000 with Service Pack 1, and had the same problem - a messed up GIF.

I started out with this image:
http://www.digitalred.com/temp/xaraforum/image1.gif

And as I change the number of colours, I get very varied results such as the images below. No matter what I do after this, the file is "ruined" - I can restore back to the original colour depth and still get a duff file.

http://www.digitalred.com/temp/xaraforum/image2.gif

http://www.digitalred.com/temp/xaraforum/image3.gif

Has anyone else experienced this problem? I've not seen mention of it on this forum, but can't see how it can be my PC because I have seen it on more than one PC.

I have created animated GIFs with Xara X before, sucessfully, so I think this must have been with v1.0a or v1.0aa

I attach the Xara file to this posting in the hope that someone else can download it, export as is - and then reduce the colours down to 64 or 48, re-export - and post their findings.

Oh, the Preview in Browser says "Using an 8 bit, 256 colour optimised palette" no matter what I choose. If the main problem isn't a bug, then surely this is !

[diniel]

I first saw this problem a couple of weeks ago when using Xara X 1.0b on a client's PC in Windows NT 4.

I created an animation in Xara, and all was well, until I tried to export it. The preview in browser looked OK, but I thought I'd reduce the number of colours.

I did this, and did a new preview. There was a strange mix of what looked like either 16 colour or monochrome frames in the animation - sometimes possibly inverting the colours I had used.

Thinking it was a display driver problem, I saved the file and viewed it on a different machine - but it looked exactly the same.

I saved the Xara X file (converting shadows and bevels to editable shapes) and opened it in CorelXara 2 before exporting .... perfectally. Then I forgot about the problem, though it was never solved.

I have just tried to create another animated GIF, this time on my own PC. I am running Windows 2000 with Service Pack 1, and had the same problem - a messed up GIF.

I started out with this image:
http://www.digitalred.com/temp/xaraforum/image1.gif

And as I change the number of colours, I get very varied results such as the images below. No matter what I do after this, the file is "ruined" - I can restore back to the original colour depth and still get a duff file.

http://www.digitalred.com/temp/xaraforum/image2.gif

http://www.digitalred.com/temp/xaraforum/image3.gif

Has anyone else experienced this problem? I've not seen mention of it on this forum, but can't see how it can be my PC because I have seen it on more than one PC.

I have created animated GIFs with Xara X before, sucessfully, so I think this must have been with v1.0a or v1.0aa

I attach the Xara file to this posting in the hope that someone else can download it, export as is - and then reduce the colours down to 64 or 48, re-export - and post their findings.

Oh, the Preview in Browser says "Using an 8 bit, 256 colour optimised palette" no matter what I choose. If the main problem isn't a bug, then surely this is !

[gwpriester]

Hello Daniel

This is a better question for Mark G to answer when he get out of the pool. (See Ross M's illustration of Mark's office in the Xara Gallery confernece).

I have noticed a new scheme has been implemented in terms of reducing colors that has some unpredictable effects as the ones you have documented here.

I have encountered this unpredictable color too when exporting images for my tutorials. The only thing I do know is the Xara team has attempted to gain the highest degree of compression when exporting a Gif or animated Gif and things like transparent backgrounds (animated Gifs) were sacrificed in order to achieve maximum file compression.

Maybe Mark will have a suggestion for how to minimize this problem.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[Mark Goodall]

Daniel

There is a bug when reducing the colours of an animated GIF, this has been fixed and the fix should be available as a download within a week.

Mark Goodall
Xara Ltd

[a4hire]

Thanks guys!
I just made a post about the same problem. It was driving me nuts. I guess I should have read through the posts before I made my post. Well at least I know that there is a fix on the way. I really valued Xara for making the animated gif files. Now I wont have to keep loading my animations back into Corel Xara and Xara webster to reduce colors. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

[diniel]

There is a bug when reducing the colours of an animated GIF, this has been fixed and the fix should be available as a download within a week.

That was posted on 5th Feb, and now it's 13th Feb. Are we talking the standard Earth week of 7 days, each of 24 hours - or the Xara week which can be an infinite length?

If the latter, does anyone have a formula I can use to convert into Earth weeks, because this bug is now starting to affect my work and will soon be costing money.

[Erik Heyninck]

Every new release contains bug because even the beta team can't try out everything. This is not typical for Xara: just look at all the dinosaurs with their teams of hundreds of best paid specialists.
When Mark wrote that it would be available in a week or so, there is still the possibility that a last minute mail reveiled a last minute bug that could be fixed in a couple of days more. Some wait for the GIF transparancy, others wait for other things, but in my opinion it is better to have to wait a little longer and have as much people that see their specific problem fixed than to tell them they have to wait for a next update.
And although money is important, you'll NEVER have enough to buy one second of life. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_cool.gif[/img]

[pduggan]

Hi

I've noticed the colour problems, but my animated GIFs seem to be much bigger too now (eg 66K from XaraX instead of 24K from CorelXARA for exactly the same GIF). I've checked all the settings and they appear to be identical.

So I'm hanging onto CorelXARA for the moment just for exporting animated GIFs!

Any ideas?

[gwpriester]

Peter's post re: file size reminded me that the CD version of Xara X, while fixing the odd color mapping that resulted when altering the color settings, seems to result in larger file sizes.

Are we back to square one?

I tried to re-export the XaraXone Title animation, which is currently around a hefty 90K, and was not able to come anywhere close to that number.

One step forward...

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[pduggan]

Gary

Had noticed your 96K (nothing that size on my site!), and wondered if your new Flash version was partly a workround for the problem?

Or was that 96K even from CorelXARA 2?

I emailed support@xara.com for help on 10 February, but all they could suggest was to check the colour depth, dithering and output size options... and I know there's more to it than that!

So I've been loading my animated stuff back into CorelXARA 2 to export, which has worked so far for my simple files, although it does come up with cute little messages about ignoring non-essential data...

Which suggests two simple questions:

1. Does anyone know what's being ignored when you do this? (It's obviously some kind of limited backwards compatibility.)

2. Can we lobby Xara to get the problem fixed? Exporting animated GIFs from CorelXARA was fine, so what's changed?

And a third:

Has the CD version really cured the colour problem, because my CD version still seems to produce some strange results when I try to limit the number of colours?

A shame, because XaraX is an improvement in every other way I can think of!

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on February 18, 2001 at 12:18 PM.]