Page 538 - Xara Designer Pro X17

538 Animations

The same example, showing in-between frames, but with a transparency change.

Like Xara Designer Pro X, Flash is vector graphics-based, which means that you can
enlarge objects with no loss of detail. It also means that Flash files can be very compact,
which is of course ideal for the web!

To illustrate just how small and compact Xara Designer Pro X Flash animations can be,
the previous example animated over one second with 24 frames (so the movie plays at a
smooth 24 frames per second) creates a Flash file that's only 700 bytes.

The 6 core types of animation
In order to keep Flash files very compact, the types of shape tweening supported by
Flash are limited to six basic types of animation. These are sometimes called the 6 core
transforms, because these are the main ways you can transform an object from one key
frame to the next.

1. Move: Move objects from one position to another.
2. Scale: Enlarge or reduce objects in size.
3. Squash or skew: Squash or skew objects.
4. Rotate: Rotate objects.
5. Transparency: Adjust the overall (flat) transparency of the objects.
6. Color changes: Change the fill (flat) color of objects.

The last item, color changes, can be applied to contoned (colored) photos. You can’t
transform a full color photo into a contoned one, but you can change a photo with one
contone color into another color.

Note: the above six transform types are absolutely key to all Flash animations.

If you look at Flash animation examples on the web, you'll find that almost all consist of
just these effects. Objects fade in and out; they whiz from one position to another. They
sometimes spin, grow or shrink. That's the basis for almost all Flash animations, and it's
very easy to produce such animations in Xara Designer Pro X. It is also possible to
tween shape outlines and some PHOTO TOOL attributes in Xara Designer Pro X, but these
are less common and only applicable to specific types of object.

One thing that isn’t possible with Flash is to change the shape of an object between key
frames though this will work when exporting as a movie clip.