export animation - change canvas size?

[daniel78]

For some reason i haven't had the need to do this before, mainly because i don't usually export gifs... but when creating an animation, there seems to be no way of exporting a .gif (or any other video format) at any canvas size other than the page/drawing size. That means I can't export it eg. twice as big, or half size. This seems like a fairly big omission for a vector graphics tool. Am i missing something?

If I use the standard "export..." menu option, I can save as a gif, and specify a size, but it only saves the first frame.

An alternative would be too select all objects from all frames at once, and then resize them all together... but i can't seem to select across multiple frames either (even when "display all" is selected)

Am I missing something for either of these options? Please tell me that I am!

It seems my only choice right now is to export as a series of PNGs and then use some other tool to create the gif. (which is annoying because I used the background and overlay frames, so I need to combine those as separate layers as well)

[gwpriester]

Not sure but the solution might be to change the page size for the animation and scale the content to the next page size.

[Egg Bramhill]

Gary is correct. By default the animation page size is 480px x 320px. However if you go Utilities/Options/Page size you can change this to whatever you require.

[handrawn]

but i can't seem to select across multiple frames either (even when "display all" is selected)

been a while since I animated in xara, but as I recall you need to make sure that both 'edit all frames' and 'all frames visible' are active for this to pick up everything

[wizard509]

Both Egg and Gary are correct. If need be, you could UN-check the page size and and manually move the right and bottom of the animation window to the approx size you want.
I don't know about "you need to make sure that both 'edit all frames' and 'all frames visible' are active for this to pick up everything" If you are on an animation page and create the first frame then copy and change the object in question however you want and so on they should all be active and export just fine. The key here is to be on an animation page. Changing the animation page size will not affect your non-animated template.

[daniel78]

Thanks for the replies - resizing the canvas by itself doesn't help, because it won't change the size of the content (unless i'm misunderstanding what you're saying - i'm not sure i follow the last part of wizard's response).
However, the suggestion from gwpriester, and handrawn did work. This is what i was trying to do, but somehow it seems I'd not been using the "edit all frames" button correctly, because that does indeed allow me to select all objects from all frames at once, and resize.
It's still an incredibly clunky way of exporting a .gif at different resolutions(!), but it does seem to work.(Xara people - quick feature request - please add export resolution to gif export!)
Thanks!

[handrawn]

resizing the canvas does not increase the size of the objects, it just increases the size of the visible exportable workspace

there are two galleries in an animation document that you can lock editability and visibility in : the frame gallery which is animation document only and the page and layer gallery that you get in all documents

if you import anything from a non animation document it is possible that it will inherit lock/visibility settings in the page and layer gallery

yes I agree it is clunky if you need more than one export size - I checked the gif export options, but no resize option there that I could see

[jcb]

But handrawn, the Page and Layer Gallery doesn't exist for animations (at least, not in my copy of Xara Designer Pro X365). That seems very bizarre to me, but even though the option to open such a gallery appears in the Galleries list, checking it does nothing, despite every other gallery in the list behaving differently.

[handrawn]

no it seems to have dropped out - just shows how long it was since I did any animation work in xara, possibly it went when flash came in [ see my reply to your thread on this subject], maybe even when layer gallery became page and layer gallery

[handrawn]

update: still there if you toggle the flyout bar first - F10 did not work for me until this was done