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

[mintintegral18]

Hi Egg, You made a fantastic New Animation (process) of size 360 x 185. My cropping resulted in 1465 x 784 file exported to new png files. Thanks again.

1. I am stuck snapping extra white space after pasting (or after Insert menu, Image from file..)
2. How can I then snap to bottom right (if page options are 1464 or something large)?

Let me suggest:
Is it because there is a default 480px margin in the Page Options size?
Is there a setting to tell Xara paste to Not shrink the pasted image?
It seems anything under 500 px and the process works with snapping to top Left.
It does seem like Zara snaps if I mouse drag, but is too granular, and the slightest pixel off, messes up my animation.

screen shots

[handrawn]

Is there a setting to tell Xara paste to Not shrink the pasted image?
It seems anything under 500 px and the process works with snapping to top Left.

go to xara utilities menu > options > view tab

if 'resize large imported photos down to....' is selected change this to the 'import at the dpi specified in the image file' option

this will probably fix the resize issue on import/paste

[handrawn]

It does seem like Zara snaps if I mouse drag, but is too granular, and the slightest pixel off, messes up my animation.

you could try using the positon settings on the selector tool infobar to force selected image[s] to a fixed position relative to 0x,0y

[mintintegral18]

attaching one Windows zipped file of two Xara projects. the second project has the cropping part complete, so you can probably ignore the first one. 4.14MB

[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..

[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