Export animation to SWF

[czhower]

Why cant the animations be exported to SWF? It exports, but just a static image.

[Egg Bramhill]

Welcome Kudzu.
XaraX can't export swf animations, only single images. (Xara3D on the otherhand can export animated swf's)
If you want to animate a vector created in XaraX you will have to create the animation in Flash or Swish.

Egg

[czhower]

Yes I know it cannot. But WHY? It seems such a stupid restriction, especially when Xara 3D supports it, Xara obviously already has the code to do it.

[Egg Bramhill]

Ah Kudzu, that I don't know. Why you can't export an swf animation that you can create an animated gif from? Perhaps Charles or someone else at Xar could enlighten us?
Egg

[LogoVend]

To me, it's like, what would be the point?

Animated GIF and Flash animation are two very different thing. GIFs are just a series of frames why would you want to make that a Flash file - it wouldn't make it any smaller, faster or better. It would still do the same thing play

Frame 1
Frame 2
Frame 3
Frame 4
Frame 5

Where as flash has movement of individual elements. Like a hand or arm or some text moving from the top to the bottom of the frame. You can't do tweening and keyframes of elements with GIFs.

Kudzu if you could enlighten us to what you're trying to achieve with your animation maybe we / I could offer more help on that matter.

[czhower]

Flash has more capbilities than a GIF - its a super set not a subset. Its not a technical limtation of SWF, and other tools I know of do output such items to SWF, but of course they dont take a Xara file as an input.

I dont want to output to SWF because I dont like GIF, its that there are places that an SWF works, that an animated GIF wont. That is certain situations and document types will display an SWF, but when given an animated GIF they display it as static.

[stlewis]

Kudzu asks why X3D can export to swf but X1 cannot (except as single frames/pages); the simple answer would be down to history. X3D is recent, X1 came out in the dim and distant past.

James is right; X1 does not know that a square in Frame 2 is the same as the one in Frame 2 but rotated 5 degrees. On the other hand X3D does. Perhaps X2 will remedy this and include some X3D-like animations BUT there will be a storm if it slows X2 down.

Several of us use X1 to create objects for use in Flash - import them to Flash and do the heavier stuff there.

[John Rayner]

I think it is because xara is not designed with a time line, a stage or any of the other required stuff, nor can objects be tweened... To keep the code lean and clean there is no animated flash graphics.