Animation in Xara Revisited

[gwpriester]

Monica? Monica? Does this work for you?

Egg - Brilliant.

[Egg Bramhill]

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?

[Gare]

@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

[Egg Bramhill]

Okay, here's a flickering neon sign.

[csehz]

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

[Egg Bramhill]

Forgot to attach the xar file

[Gare]

Thanks, Egg! It's a clean, exceptionally self-explanatory example you've gifted the community with.

Hi csehz —

There is some confusion in the content creator’s community over what a Shockwave file is, and whether is it the same as a Flash file. Technically, a SWF is, or should be, a vector-based animation, although you can certainly put a JPEG or other image file in a SWF file using XWD and XDP. A Flash file, the type that Apple decided not to support a few years ago, is commonly used as a “container”, a wrapper for highly-compressed video. But if you have the patience, you could put a video into a SWF file using Xara products, you’d have to have a way to turn the video into individual frames and the resulting file size would make the effort not only masochistic, but ridiculous in saved file size.

Because support for SWF and FLV file formats—specifically for mobile devices—has been on and off for the past few years and MPEG-4 has grown in popularity on the Web, I cannot recommend sticking to only SWF as animation output, even though a vector shape-only animation is fantastically small as you see here (if you’re viewing on a desktop computer!).

I think GIF will be around in the foreseeable future, although it’s large in comparison to SWF file sizes. You just have to know who your audience is, and know what animation file formats their browsers support. Even on the desktop, sometimes “Flash” is not visible on pages because the user’s browser is blocking it, sometimes this is by accident, as a security risk, which has been Apple, Inc.’s reason for not supporting it for as far back as Steve Jobs was aware of the risks with the file format.

By the way, does everyone realize that you can export an animation you create in XWD and XDP to AVI file format with alpha channel transparency? Here’s how you could create an animated title for a video (let’s make it HD here), that you can super over footage with transparency. Now, you need a video editor that “sees” the AVI file as containing transparency; I’ve not seen any entry level programs, but if you or someone you know uses Adobe After Effects or Premiere, these two editors will import AVI footage that has an alpha channel, and interpret this channel as transparency information:

1. Set up your animation from the beginning to 1280 x 720 pixels. This is called 720p high definition, and there are higher resolutions but I want to keep this simple here.

2. Set your frames on the Animation Frame Gallery to a duration of 0.03 seconds, which is equal to 30 frames per second, a common US fps rate for digital video.

3. Create your animation; move text around, for example, “XARA Films Presents…”, for example.

4. Choose File>Export Animation, probably after you previewed your video.

5. In the Export Animation dialog, choose AVI from the Save as Type drop-down list and then click Options.

6. In the Options box, choose Uncompressed from the drop-down list at top, because any compression (“codec”) scheme we have in 2013 for AVI files disallows the saving of an alpha channel, and certainly not the MS Video 1 or Intel compressors offered when the transparency box is unchecked in this dialog.

7. Type 30 in the Frames per second box so the animation frame duration agrees with your exported video. This is called the resolution of the video, and doesn’t do anything to speed up or slow down your video. Generally, it just makes your video choppy or smooth.

8. Check the make background transparent checkbox, the Area to save doesn’t make a difference if you’re going to work with this video in an editor, click Apply and then click Close to get back to the Export dialog box, click Export and then get to editing with your new video clip in an editor that recognizes alpha channels in AVI type video.

Xara 3D will export to AVI also, but the background transparency issue becomes academic: there is no AVI with alpha option in Xara 3D Maker v7, but you could in practice define a solid green background for your animation and then use a video editor’s green screen chromakey feature (if supported) to trim out the background. Alternatively, if you export as a SWF, you’ll have the transparency if you specify it, but then you have to find a utility that can convert the SWF to something easier to work with, such as an AVI or QuickTime video with alpha. After Effects can import a SWF from Xara 3D with transparency, and it’s also $1,000 retail or $50/month to rent.

My Best,

Gary