Animation in Xara

[handrawn]

Hi Frank

here be the gif friendly version of 'B' and 'O':

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...303#post281303

[Big Frank]

yeah, like i said, the overlay switch is pretty pointless

i've been using xara to create animations since the last century and have still not found a good reason to use it, yet the real overlay that we would all like to see doesn't exist

unless you're about to light up my life and tell me it does exist

[handrawn]

HI Frank

in gif animation an overlay is intended to 'add' objects to the background which then persist through the following frames - by masking you can also therefore 'remove' objects from the background too - this is more efficient in terms of file size than remaking the background lots of times - very important when making gifs for web, certainly in the old days, as I am sure you will know

but it is in the 'background' as such - objects in subsequent frames will stack higher in the render - so it won't do what I think you are wanting, which is a different kind of overlay.

[I too was making gif animations in the previous century, but not then with xara, I only discoverd her shortly after the turn of the millenium]


EDIT: I guess the same applies to flash, but I don't make flash animations - apart from 'morphing' [which xara does not do] tweened animation ain't my thing

[Big Frank]

ah ok, thanks

but, no, it doesn't do what would be really useful

oh well, back to dear xara...

[Gare]

Let me moderate for a moment, lest this become a "What Xara can't do" thread.

• There are a lot of programs—and handrawn would know their names a lot better than I—that you have the option to manually draw frames in a flipbook style, or ask the program for assistance by 'tweening the frames, between the frames you've created as keys.

• Xara's 'tweening capability is based on animating vector shapes, and it has held to Flash (Shockwave, swf) standards for as long as the program has had an animation feature.

This does not mean that an ambitious animator is bound to using Xara's (and Adobe's) 'tweening method to build an animation. This waving flag we've been discussing? Let me spin some math on you and you tell me you disagree:

I estimate that a cycle of flag waving would be about 3 seconds. Less and you're cheating the smoothness of the animation and more and you're creating more frames than you need to, to visually animate the graphics. So in 2012, we mostly accept 30 frames per second as full animation, so that's 90 frames you need to create. With this qualification: when film was 24 frames/second, a lot of animators used to animate "on twos": they'd hit the button on an Oxberry stand twice for each cel, so in effect they only needed to draw 12 frames per second.

You don't have to accept this convention, but a lot of us grew up on Saturday morning watching 12 frames per second cartoons.

If we bring this frame rate back to Xara, its default frame rate is a frame is onscreen for .5 seconds at a default frame rate of 24 frames per second. To me, having something onscreen for 12 frames is Death. But remember, as with photos, no two animations are alike, so it really depends on whether you let Xara tween frames over a short span of timer with a lot of motion, or not, that yields a choppy animation or a smooth one.

I'll try to come back later with what I consider a decent flag waving animation.

@Dave—

Keep in mind that a swf export includes some Adobe technology, but for the most part? Flash is a "wrapper", a "container" for moving pictures, just like MPEG-4 is, and QuickTime is, and AVI. So you get yourself a good file convertor, and you can easily go from a finihed exported shockwave file to an AVI.

By the way, not only does Xara Graphic Designer export to AVI, but it will export with an alpha channel.

Huh? Yeah. AVI has always had the capability to hold an alpha channel, but many software engineers either didn't know how to deploy it, or didn't care. The deal is that to make an exported AVI with transparency meaningful to your work, you need a program that reads alpha channels. MAGIX products do not (and I've mentioned this to TPTB), but Adobe Premiere and After Effects will take in a Xara exported swf or AVI with transparency, as long as the AVI is uncompressed—and you do this in Exp[ort>Options>Make Background Transparent.

I've used Xara and Xara 3D these past few months to make animated titles for the Xara Xone tutorial videos. They're HD 720 so I set up my animation page at 1280 pixels wide by 720 pixels high, 30 frames per second, rock and roll...

Now I mentioned that if you want to do "full cel animation", IOW no keys but you can live with 12 frames/second, you can do anything you like in an animation frame. You will just need a lot of them, and hittong Copy and ten editing would seem the wise thing to do to speed up your work. I listed all the stuff you can and cannot do with the Flash standard (which means within Xara) in the February Xara Xone...

right here

...under the Read Me First, "Objects and Fills that Flash Supports".

You might want to copy and paste what I wrote into a local Word document or some such.

My Best,

Gary

P.S. Dave, on this forum, the context for embedding a swf so people don't need to click a link is:









My Best,

Gary

[Big Frank]

P.S. Dave, on this forum, the context for embedding a swf so people don't need to click a link is:

Attachment 91867

you can also upload your flash file to TG and then use the same convention

[flashxxx=http://www.talkgraphics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=86133] width=600 height=150[/flashxxx] <-- remove the xxx for it to work



i read somewhere you're not allowed to post things externally, well that was how it used to be anyway

"mais ça, comme ils disent, c'était avant..."

[Gare]

I stand corrected by TPTB; external links are frowned upon. It's much better to upload, or with YouTube videos, embed the vid instead of providing an external link.

I've edited my previous post to reflect this policy—which I won't argue with because it keeps traffic on tg—as I think most members will find that the embedded local swf plays pretty nicely.

P.S. you need the ID to complete the snippet for embedding a swf. This is generated after you place the swf inline in your post. You simply edit in the snippet, remove what the forum adds, put the ID tag in where I call it out in my post, use the dimensions or the vid will look smooshed, life is good.

—gary

[dcahall]

Gare: Too bad that Xara does not animate molds.......when I did my flag, the preview looked pretty smooth but when I exported it to both gif and swf, I returned to the somewhat jerky performace. Disappointing......have not had time to go play with my approach to the shadow/highlight effect. Perhaps you can same me some time because what I was thinking about trying was changing the opacity and fill effect from one frame to the next. Will that work (be tweened)?

BTW: I do not see any of your stuff on ArtRage.

Big Frank: You said Flash is on he way out. What do you see as its replacement? I am seeing some tools for creating AVIs and Microsoft tried its Silverlight but that has not gone anywhere at all. My neighbor's daughter is off at an art school and has just changed her major to animation. She told me they use the Adobe (After Effects looks really powerful). The Adobe product line is just too darn expensive for amatures like myself. I do this stuff for fun, not as a professional.

[Gare]

Hi Dave—

It's Labor Day Weekend and I'm in and out a lot, but I have addressed something regarding the flag.

Stay tuned to this space in a day or two.

When Big Frank says Flash is on the way out: Flash was used a lot as a "container" for video. Apple decided not to support it on mobile devices, and that more or less killed Flash as the medium for the Web. Adobe itself is moving toward a combo of CSS and JaveScript and HTML 5 to make animations for the Web.

MPEG-4 is still a predominant video format. If you want to change format X to Y, go get AnyVideo Convertor.

Um, you don't see any work on the ArtRage site because I haven't posted any work! I post here, and on Graphics.com, and CGSociety...that's all the time I can spend showing my work off, Dave.

Let me conclude for the moment with a "study" in flag waving. Look at it for keyframe possibilities. I'm not sure, but I believe that if you're diligent and patient, you can replicate this in Xara. I did this in Cinema4D and I will post some keys within Xara in a day or two.



My Best,

Gary

[handrawn]

that movie is not loading for me Gary - FFox15 or IE9

EDIT - and flash player ver 11.4.402.265

Frank's are ok afaik