Animation in Xara

[dcahall]

[QUOTE=Big Frank;454208]Any images uploaded to this forum and placed in-line are displayed as-is (like my animation) unless they exceed a certain size (dimensions, not kilobytes), in which case they are automatically resized (like yours).

Thanks for that tip. I opened your green flag in PGD and the flag is "off the page" on every frame. I have seen that if I open a gif I created with Xara as well. Any way to correct that?

If I could add control points and use the mold tool, you could build a full flag (like the US one). I am going to try some other silly stuff to see what could be done as well. I understand that by changing the timing of the frames you could build something by having a totally different object that looked like the base object and doing it as well. The problem I see in building something like this in Xara is being able to manipulate the fill of the object. Thus the mold tool would work if you could have more control points to manipulate the object (including the fill - interior content) of the object. Xara is not far a way from this.

[Big Frank]

I opened your green flag in PGD and the flag is "off the page" on every frame. I have seen that if I open a gif I created with Xara as well. Any way to correct that?

I'm not sure tbh, but it's never been an issue for me. Set all frames as visible and editable, select all and then just drag everything onto the canvas. Also a good opportunity to adjust the page dimensions. I'm far from being an expert, but I love dabbling with animation in Xara. Ever since I got my first copy of Xara I haven't used anything else.

[Gare]

Hi David—

You could submit the Mould tool's enhancements you want to the "Dear Xara" forum, but honestly? The point is moot, I believe. Charles probably won't ask the engineers to devote time on an existing feature—and in the process tearing up a lot of code—to change not only the Mould tool's features, but the model for those features. They have it set up that both the Envelope and the Perspective modes require four points, no more and no less. I'm not very familiar with application code, but I get the sense that the Mould tool is very different code from the Envelope filter that CorelDRAW has used for years, which allows the deletion and addition of control points.

I'd like to move on from the Mould tool and what you can't do with it in animations, on this thread, David. Even if you could add control points, the model for animating stuff is based around Adobe's Flash engine.

• Flash does not allow the sort of animation that might be possible with the Mould tool because it changes the path of shapes, based on a node-governing motion. Flash disallows nodes (control points) to be moved between keyframes by the program. Yes, you can move control points, but then you lose the 'tweening capability of Xara.

So one could argue that Xara is limited by whatever can be declared in Adobe Flash animation. At the same time, one would also need to argue that Adobe is to blame for making Flash "rules" as limited as they are. I'm trying to be fair and not appear as a total suck-up here, honest! Xara's animation features are limited, and the way we've seen Xara grow in successive versions? It's not likely they will revisit the animation features. Which saddens me, because HTML 5+CSS+JavaScripting is the new model for animations on the Web.

Now, there are also animation off the Web—video, traditional cel-painted cartoons, 3D—and there are no real restrictions because you need something other than Xara to create them.

On the other hand, if you're slightly brain-damaged like me, the limitations of Xara can be seen as a challenge, and by trying to work around them, you might discover something you didn't originally consider, and the results might be as interesting as your original goal.



The Xara file is attached in case anyone would like to improve upon it. By the way, I only named three of the spheres. Seems that duplicates can inherit the name and be keyed, so this was not a big-time effort.

@Big Frank—Agreed completely that you don't have to eat up bandwidth to entertain a web audience. Small can be beautiful, too, as you've demonstrated.

My Best,

[Gare]

Here's another starting place: The stripes and the blue field are lines. I didn't animation the line control points because in Flash, this blows the keyframing. What I did instead was create a wavy line, and then scale it disproportionately, vertically.



XARA file is attached.

My Best,

Gary

[dcahall]

Gare, I agree that we have kind of beat the subjct to death. I think it helps to know though where the limits are. My biggest concern remains that what I see in the preview (not Preview in Browser) does not always accurately represent what I will see after I export the animation.

Going back to that bouncing ball tutorial, you notice that the tween produces a very smooth animation without having a lot of frames. In the messing around we have been doing with the flags, I am not seeing the same results even when we name the objects so they will be keyframed.

I also have a concern that if I open an animated gif (regardless of where it was created) all of the content if "off the stage".

I would like to know more about the HTML5-CSS-Javascript approach. The animation that was shared in this thread was very impressive. I am probably unique but less than 10% of the animations I have created in the past were used for web purpose. Most of them were used in PowerPoint and in DVDs I created for some reunions. Prior to Xara, I used other tools and some of them are no longer available or have been buried in other packages that are too darn expensive for a retired guy who is doing this stuff for fun.

I am going to play around with the AVI capabilities a little more and see what happens in that arena or if I run into the same problems. I am been off testing another tool for another product so have stepped away a little for now.

I am enjoying exploring the capabilities/limitations though. Just wish I were a little better artist. Sometimes I get ideas but do not know the tool nor have the aristic capabilities of some of you guys so the results are not always what I would like,

[Big Frank]

My biggest concern remains that what I see in the preview (not Preview in Browser) does not always accurately represent what I will see after I export the animation

That's why you should preview in your browser. You don't test a race car in a field do you? You test it on the surface it was designed for. Same with these animations.

I also have a concern that if I open an animated gif (regardless of where it was created) all of the content if "off the stage".

Your "stage" is the page. The grey area around the page is called the pasteboard. The page, when creating or editing a GIF animation, is a Xara convention and has nothing to do with the animation. An animation, when exported to GIF, loses anything that isn't in the GIF89a specification. The only place you will see the page is in your XAR file. When you import an animated GIF, you are not importing the working file, you are importing the exported code and Xara is only displaying the frames as originally exported by the application that created the GIF. Even if you import a GIF made in Xara, it will not look like your XAR file, because it has been processed by an export filter. It's like feeding a whole bunch of grass to a cow. Well, let's not go there...

I explained above how to get your imported GIF onto the page: "Set all frames as visible and editable, select all and then just drag everything onto the canvas. Also a good opportunity to adjust the page dimensions.". But you don't even have to do that because when you export your animation you have the option of exporting either what is within the page boundaries or the objects in your frames, ignoring the page completely. It just makes things cleaner, visually, if you place your objects on the page and adjust the page boundaries accordingly. But it's by no means mandatory.

[Gare]

@David—

David, don't confuse the content with the container.

I don't know as anyone else besides me has posted a CSS animation, but I created the animation in Cinema 4D. That's the origin of the content. The container is CSS—I uploaded it to Google's Swiffy free for the time being) service as a Flash file because C4D can export to Flash (swf, actually). From there a copy became a 1.2MB HTML document.

Big Frank also has an excellent point: what you see in Preview is local to your hard drives. What you post has to go from a server to your screen, so naturally the quality won't be identical.

@ Everyone—

Rule Number One for designing an animation or anything else:

If your final product looks wrong, don't change the data. Change your view.

Here's a simple example, and Dave, I'll get to animation in a moment. You take a photo and bring it into Xara, and you do all sorts of neat color correcting until it looks perfect. Three weeks later, you buy a new monitor.

And your beautiful photo from 3 weeks ago looks lousy.

What do you do? Do you re-edit your perfect photo so it looks good on your new monitor?

NO.


You recalibrate your monitor.

You always, always, always change your view of data. Only as a last recourse do you change the data itself.

Hint: one change is relative, the other is permanent!

++++++++++++++++++

So, Dave, animation? The only way to judge how an animation will look on the web, is to post it on the web. So you create your animation, always comparing what you see in a copy on the web to what you're working on.

If you want perfection, you don't use GIF or SWF. You write a copy at 30 frames/second to MPEG-4 file format and then transcode it to DVD at 8 Mbps transfer rate.

Some containers will slow you down, while others will present your content the way you created it.

For example, what if you owned a $$$$$$ 3D animation program and knew how to use it, and wrote a HD [720p] (1280 by 720 pixels) animation to file, AVI, no compression.

It would play back on your computer like crap. Why? You didn't take into consideration your final playback device. Computers typically use a processor that's good for most general purposes, while DVD players hooked up to TV sets have dedicated processors that do just one thing: they display images very fast, very smoothly, while PCs do not, not usually. The DVD you put in a DVD player, and the streaming media you might rent from Apple or Amazon is specially encoded (usually to MPEG-4 or similar), and has a fairly undemanding amount of data that needs to be processed per second: this is called transfer rate and a reasonable MPEG-4 on YouTube is usually 2000kbps, while commercial DVDs are 8000.

The above is all true but you don't have to ingest it right now, Dave, or anyone else.

Yes, there is a lot to learn about the computer specifics of animation, to make it come out looking right time after time. I have to do this every month with the tutorials—and to stop from pulling my remaining hair out, I've memorized a system with the software I own.

I have no idea how the industry accumulated so many different parameters and file formats! My point is that there is a difference between art you create, and how it is displayed on a monitor other than your own.

If something looks less than perfect, blame how its presented first, and not the content itself.

Make any sense?

My Best,

Gary

[dcahall]

All very true. Both of you (you and Big Frank) have made some excellent and valid points. I completely understand the points both of you are making and you have provided some very good educational points.

Maybe I am wrong, but here are some points I am taking away from this:

• Do not use the Preview link to see how an animation will really look. Use it only to see if you are achieving the type of effect you want to achieve in your animation
• Do not oepn an animated gif in Xara to edit it unless you are ready to resize the page and move all of the objects on each page to the Xara page
• Use Xara for rather unsophisticated animations (like the bouncing ball tutorial) but if you want some comprehensive things like the waving flags Big Frank pointed us to, use a different tool

I really like Xara and have recommended it to many people I know and have worked with. I think it is important to learn what limitations (if any) a product has and choose the right tool for the right job. In this thread, I proved that I am not as knowledgabl as you guys on this topic and that I have a limited range of what I want to accomplish that is probably not in sync with how others are using it.

I will sit back, watch and try learn from the rest of you and enjoy the fruits of your efforts.

[Gare]

Xara represents different things to different people, David.

Charles wrote in the foreword to my book that he wanted to create not specifically a vector drawing program, but a design program, in which people from different disciplines can express themselves. Bob likes Desktop Publishing, Sue needs a technical illustration, Peter wants a GIF animation for the Web, most all go away happy.

Which is truly saying quite a lot about an inexpensive piece of software, that, sadly, too few people accept and adopt as a serious, commercial program. Instead, one person laments that it doesn't do enough Desktop Publishing, or enough animation, or this or that, and are far too easily dismissive of it as a serious creative tool. That's the problem when you try to be a lot (if not everything) to everybody. You wind up being not enough, to too many.

Me? I've been using Xara for over a decade, creating EPS files and doing color proof work for the books I've written. You don't get a lot closer to an "acid test" for the commercial possibilities of a product. Because if I or Xara screwed up, tens of thousands of dollars would hang in the balance, and I'd simply hang. The Production houses that work for publishers always "assumed" I used Illustrator.

I didn't.

And the books went from Production to the commercial presses, to warehouse, to stores, to customers. Successfully.

I believe Mike W. also uses Xara for production-critical work, as other are, I'm sure.

It can't do everything, but it ain't a toy, either.

:)

—Gary

[Big Frank]

I agree completely with Gary, David.

You are over-simplifying what you see as a problem and/or a shortcoming with the program.

I use Xara almost exclusively for ALL of my graphic design work (I'd say 99%), be it traditional art for print or website design. Over the years, and I've been using it since 1997-ish, I have learned that the capabilities of this program continue to exceed my expectations. I love it and I simply would not do without it. But only experience will demonstrate that to you.

The green flag animation is so beautiful because it was created not in a 2D animation program but a 3D modelling program. If what you want is in effect a 3D animation (a waving Texan flag) then do not expect the 2D animation features of a fully-featured 2D graphic design program to give you that.