making movies

[Gare]

Hi snafuwanleg—

Xara 3D was intended to create animated GIFs and Shockwave (swf) files, and was never really engineered to produce feature length motion pictures or even titling for motion pictures. And this is why there is a limit to the length of an animation cycle…IOW an animation that ends one frame before it begins to create a continuous animation when looped by a Web device, or an innate one such as GIF.

I am supposing because you want both HD and you want the AVI file format, that you have bigger plans for your animation than a 30 frame cycle of something going on, right?

Okay, I wrote a book on animation using a non-animation program (Photoshop) about 5 years ago and the rules haven’t changed all that much.

1. Your animation rate in Xara 3D should be 30 frames per second (fps) because progressive, not interlaced and not GIF, is the de facto standard for digital media frame rate.

2. Your frame size output can be anything you like, but if you’re conforming to broadcast standards, 720 by 480 yields a standard NTSC compliant frame, but the pixels are .9 aspect ratio and Xara 3D doesn’t do that non square pixel stuff, so you’d used 640 by 480 p, square pixels. Your HD export of 1440-1028 is quite an usual size and aspect ratio, and you might have a problem viewing it properly. Again, Xara 3D only deals in square pixels on export and 1440 by 1028 is a pixel aspect ratio of 1.4, not even 1.3 as widescreen is specified. I recommend that you experiment with 720p first, 1280 by 720 pixels, before continuing.

3. There is no equity in writing a video to 15 fps, or 25 fps (unless you plan to broadcast in certain countries in Europe and South America. 30 fps is the standard for digital video, and if you use anything less, you’re not slowing the film down, you’re just decreasing the video time resolution so, for example, 12 frames per second for 30 seconds takes the same time as 30 frames per second for 30 seconds, but the video looks choppy at 12 fps because the duration of each still frame is onscreen for too long.

4. Don’t use any codec when exporting. Leave compression to a third party free convertor such as Any Video Convertor. Why? Because codecs that are called from Windows are notoriously crappy, or crappily implemented. What you want in the end is an uncompressed copy of your video that can be copied over and over again with any number of codecs until you find the right one for you. Otherwise, you’re going to be exporting different copies from X3D for days.




5. My recommendation is original dimensions, no audio (obviously) anywhere from 2500 to 6000 bits per second frame transfer rate (affects the quality and the capability to stream), progressive scan, not interlaced, widescreen orientation if it’s widescreen and the option is offered.


By the way, here’s a swf animation exported from Xara Designer Pro. It can not only export to AVI, but it can also export with a transparency mask. That’s how I got the other animations behind it using a video editor. NLTE (non-linear Timeline editors) are important to anyone’s work if they are serious about animation or video in general. For starters, I think I read in the X3D documentation that one of the MAGIX movie editors will recognize and drop-out an alpha channel.



My Best,

Gary