looking for a way to animate 16 png files, crop too, swiftly in Xara designer

[handrawn]

egg is an expert in xara animation, I am not, I use another program, but one cardinal rule I will never deviate from is 'always work in whole pixels' - your final animation is going to be sized in whole pixels, so you must make sure you crop your images to whole pixels and in the correct aspect ratio

obviously, if the image[s] you are using are not in the same aspect ratio as your final video size you will need to have white space either in x or y; if you are making an animation that is not a standard video size maybe not, but you must still have your images in whole pixels

your screen capture should be in whole pixels and you should keep it that way - if somewhere along the way, either by cropping or whatever, your image has one dimension that is in pixel fractions you are going to have to either remake it, or, pad it to whole pixels by placing it over a white rectangle of the correct whole pixels size and making a bitmap copy [thereby introducing some white space], or recropping it at a whole pixel size [thereby losing a small part of it]

this is particularly important in xara whose reporting of image size is only as accurate as the number of decimal points your windows OS is set to; a small variation can completely throw an animation, as you noted earlier....

[handrawn]

like this ?

[pauland]

In the olden days I would often do stuff like this with flash.

Looking at the animation made by hand drawn I would use the end frame still to start with and make it a static background plate across all frames.

I would then add shapes to hide what should not be seen in the first frame - those shapes would be the same as the background colour. The next frame is then the first frame less some of the shapes that obscure the background plate, the third frame has more shapes removed.

On frames where the lines are and they change position, I would take that section from the image and just add that cropped line over the base image as required.

I might have done this via masking in flash.

Trying a flipbook effect of the whole frame is going to be a nightmare because any misalignment will cause jitters. Taking a single frame as a backdrop and changing what is seen
via an overlaid shape will keep everything rock steady.

This really is a simple job.

[handrawn]

'han-drawn' never liked flash much, coming from, and still working in, a cell based animation background now with added timelines... but yes this is a really simple job

my animation is just paging through the images which have been cropped to exactly the same size and placed in sequence at exactly the same positon in each frame, pretty much in the way egg outlined in his video

your method will likely reduce file-size and [if it is possible in a xara gif, I can't remember] give scope for transitions that could help make it smoother....

I am not convinced your way would be better for a flipbook effect.... misalignment would cetrainly cause jitter, but misalignment [unless you do it for effect] is a number one sin from my point of view, like dancing the wrong steps or hitting the wrong notes

[pauland]

'han-drawn' never liked flash much, coming from, and still working in, a cell based animation background now with added timelines... but yes this is a really simple job

my animation is just paging through the images which have been cropped to exactly the same size and placed in sequence at exactly the same positon in each frame, pretty much in the way egg outlined in his video

your method will likely reduce file-size and [if it is possible in a xara gif, I can't remember] give scope for transitions that could help make it smoother....

I am not convinced your way would be better for a flipbook effect.... misalignment would cetrainly cause jitter, but misalignment [unless you do it for effect] is a number one sin from my point of view, like dancing the wrong steps or hitting the wrong notes

I made my primary living from Flash and I would not class myself as a professional animator like you. Flash was used by a lot of professional animators in it's time and I made several Apple IOS projects using it.

Mostly the animations I work with are based on human interaction, so I don't make videos as such except to build image sequences for use 'flipbook style' in software - for example a walking sequence where the character is guided via human interaction or a reaction sequence when the right or wrong choice is made.

My flash days peaked with a project that used flash entirely and had over a million online sign-ups for a charity and my software was controlling multiple characters walking around a showground of tents - all automated.

Anyway..

[Egg Bramhill]

First & formost your screen grabs are not exactly the same alignment. This is an issue outside Xara.
All the screen grab images in your file is 2560 x 1080 px.
Utilites / Options / Page Size / set to 2560x1080.
With the view-all and select all open on the Action Frame Gallery, Select All.
Set the origin point to Top Left.
Set the 16 selected images to 2560x1080px
Export animation.
It works but it's too big 2088Kbs and because your screen-grabs wheren't exactly aligned (or perhaps your method of cropping) there's a slight jump in the animation.

I reset the page size to 1280x540 and reset the 16 images to the same.
This created an animated gif of 636Kb which is probably still too large but it could be reduced further using backgrounds and overlays.

Heres the animation after painstaking re-alignment, this one set to 800 x 428 (289Kb)
I would know the value of such a gif unless it was for software promotion, neither would I do this animation as a gif.