Page 548 - Xara Designer Pro X17

548 Animations

Note: Frame names do not matter and can be anything you like. They do not have to be
Frame 1, Frame 2, etc. Animations always play the frames in the order top to bottom,
irrespective of the names.

Photos

Because Flash files usually consist of vector shapes, and the transforms are relatively
simple, the files can be very small. Photos and bitmaps can be embedded into Flash
animations, but unless you are careful it will result in huge animation files. You can
perform all core Flash transforms on bitmaps or photos (i.e. you can move, scale,
squash, rotate, fade and re-color.).

Flash files can include both PNG and JPEG images just as .xar files do, and Designer
Pro automatically creates photos of the right resolution when creating the Flash file. So
for example you can load a hi-res digital camera image, size this down to be say 200
pixels, and this means that a 200 pixel image will get included, and not the full hi-res
JPEG.

When higher resolution photos are converted down for inclusion in Flash files the JPEG
compression setting (Animation Properties dialog, Flash Options tab) can be used to
control how compressed your JPEG images are. See below.

When tweening bitmaps or photos, only one copy of the bitmap is stored in the Flash file,
so you can perform transformations of the bitmap with little overhead. In other words, just
because the bitmap appears on frames 1, 2 and 3 of your animation, this does not mean
three copies of the bitmap are embedded in the Flash file.

Non-JPEG Bitmaps
Other types of bitmaps, for example, BMP, TIFF, or PNG bitmaps, are usually a lot larger
and thus less suitable for use in Flash animations (for photos JPEG compression is a lot
better than PNG). However if you include a low resolution PNG image (that is one of
96dpi or less – the status line shows you the resolution of any selected image) then this
is kept as a PNG image in the Flash file. Higher resolution images (>96dpi) will be
converted into a JPEG (transparent JPEG if required) .

You can control the compression used for this automatic JPEG conversion using a slider
in the FLASH OPTIONS tab of the ANIMATION PROPERTIES dialog. The usual compression
value is 75%, but you can vary the quality, preview the animation and quickly see the
quality and size savings.