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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
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    Exclamation Animation in Xara Revisited

    Hello,

    I have quite a few questions for y'all.

    I was wondering if anyone knew how to create a flickering light on a Xara page, similar to the light on http://www.bottlebellphotography.com/. I wouldn't want the long intro; I just want the part of the flickering light. Any ideas? Do I HAVE to use flash? Also, is there a way to make an firefly, butterfly, etc move on the page? If I had an image of a pretty insect, could I get it to move from the bottom of the page to the top? If so, how do I do that? Last question, can you change the cursor to something other than an arrow (for everyone who visits the site, not just the person who created it)?

    Please reply!!

    Thank you all for your time.

    Take Care,

    Monica

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Aug 2000
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    Placitas, New Mexico, USA
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    Default Re: Creating a flickering light in Xara

    It's Flash. So my guess is the designer created the effect from scratch.

    You could always show some chutzpah and e-mail the photographer and ask.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
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    Liverpool, N.Y.
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    Default Re: Creating a flickering light in Xara

    Hi Monica—

    You can use Xara's animation features to create a flickering effect with text or other shape by specifying a very short duration for a frame with a particular brightness, move on to another frame of short duration with a different brightness for the shape, and so on.

    Here are some Flash animation guidelines and a video tutorial on basic animation

    Changing a cursor on a web page is possible—I've visited web sites where the visitor's cursor changes— but it takes more clever Flash coding (or CSS) than is currently possible in Xara...to the best of my knowledge. For what might be considered Cleverness foe the sake of being clever, I'd advise you to pass on this one.

    My Best,

    Gary

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Aug 2000
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    Harwich, Essex, England
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    Default Re: Creating a flickering light in Xara

    Try this xar file. It's very similar to the effect you want. To create the flicker just create a black shape over a bitmap (bitmap in this case is in the background layer) name the shape "darkener" and copy the frame and change darkeners transparency. Repeat as often as required. To view the effect go File / Preview Flash. n.b. in the attached xar the darkening shape is named "black"
    Attached Files Attached Files
    Egg

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  5. #5
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    Default Re: Creating a flickering light in Xara

    Nice, example, Egg. I see your timing is 2/10s of a second, usually.

    That should give Monica a good head start on the flickering text effect she wants by just following the order and duration you have on the Animation Frame Gallery.

    My Best,

    Gary

  6. #6
    Join Date
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    Default Re: Creating a flickering light in Xara

    Monica? Monica? Does this work for you?

    Egg - Brilliant.

  7. #7
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    Default Re: Creating a flickering light in Xara

    Cheers Gary. I was going to use this effect to recreate your fairly recent neon sign tutorial but as always time is the problem.

    Other Gary. Monica is the OP or am I missing your point?
    Egg

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  8. #8
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    Default Re: Creating a flickering light in Xara

    @Egg—

    I believe Other Gary is asking where she is, why she hasn't posted again, what with all this great material we've provided for her.

    I took a whack at created the sort of "stutter" the photography has with his text, based on your leag, Egg



    And you know what? Without bothering to write to the photographer as O.G. suggested, I think that this might be a full-fledged FLV file, a video animation in a Flash wrapper, and not straight vector animation as we can create in Xara. There's noise, and a blur in before the flickering, and I've seen this script done in After Effects and with plug-ins such as ParticleIllusion.

    So I think there's a workable solution here, but it might not be what the photographer is running as a very tired, annoying portal to his content online.

    My Best,

    Gary
    Attached Files Attached Files

  9. #9
    Join Date
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    Default Re: Creating a flickering light in Xara

    Okay, here's a flickering neon sign.

    Attached Files Attached Files
    Egg

    Intel i7 - 4790K Quad Core + 16 GB Ram + NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1660 Graphics Card + MSI Optix Mag321 Curv monitor
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  10. #10
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    Hungary, Poland
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    Default Re: Creating a flickering light in Xara

    These flickering effects are great, thanks and executable are with so small file sizes

 

 

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