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.

[mintintegral18]

Thank you Handrawn and Egg. It's working. Is there a way to custom keyboard shortcut, animation gallery, New Frame?

notes:
a. Xara, Utilities, screen capture feature, can be assigned a keyboard short cut and is better than Windows G or alt Print screen, imo.
b. Utilities, options, mouse, Magnetic snap radii, setting this to 20 (try toggling on off the next Windows menu, snap to grid, setting, to ensure it "applies")
c. Windows menu, Snap to Grid, does also snap objects
d. using New Blank Document, keyword "blank", when capturing/pasting Xara screen shots

[handrawn]

Thank you Handrawn and Egg. It's working. Is there a way to custom keyboard shortcut, animation gallery, New Frame?

you are welcome

I don't think there is a key s/c - the new button on the frame gallery is the usual way ?

@pauland - sure, I have seen some truely excellent things done in flash.... but personally way back 15 years ago when I first started with toonboom I was put off flash because it was common to have swf sequences that needed to be imported into TB and integrated into the animation sequences; flash as you know makes [should that be made?] compromises when it renders ...it was a pain

[mintintegral18]

Yes, finally noticed my original screen grabs were off, thanks. I started fresh again. Also, I somehow missed that this thread had a second page. Thanks everyone. To me, flipbook style ensures me of snap or crop across any application, or I could "reboot" the entire process, so long as screen grabs work. Or pixels are reliable, as handrawn mentioned. But the idea is to use Microsoft Power BI "trend line." They only publish "bookmarks." I made 16 bookmarks and used F11 full screen and took 16 screen grabs after clicking a bookmark. Windows snipping tool will not let me set a rectangle crop size either. I want to see linear regression in action. The scatter plots do have a "play" feature, but it's wonky to what is used as x or y axis. So the idea of cropping only what is changing is probably worth looking into. And Egg's process, I can use for any scenario. I can now place drawings by hand into flatbed scanner, then scan and crop using HP printer software and try some basic animation. But perhaps animation of a comic, changing eyeballs and eye brows and mouth only, perhaps a second process of this with cropping (not flipbook style) could be worked on.

Egg, may I suggest you change Windows resolution, or change the render output of your videos to MP4 or mkv or something or ensure you have HD enabled. I could barely make out some menu selections. Actually, they worked fine, with yellow circle and because I have Xara installed, but the value of these videos, they should show bigger somehow. To better balance the knowledge transfer in the video with richer video quality showing text of menus, radio buttons, tiny toolbars. I did open, and full screen, in youtube. In my fullscreen, I was expecting to see your video resolution blow up bigger.

notes on forum attachments:
This forum seems to crop and resize attachments. On the bright side, This forum also saves all my past year or so screen shots. (Coincidentally, Windows 10 just this month or so, some major update, deleted the default Feedback folder in Pictures folder, that I was using for such screen shots, anytime I want to "show" what I am talking about. I had about a years worth or software screen shots, showing all the things that I may forget I learned in Xara or my other music software, now gone, except in this forum).

some screen shots of important steps from Egg's video or the Xara features I did not know about.

[mintintegral18]

gif is the only way to animate in XARA? Is there another way to animate this? reread your post.