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Introduction
Xara Web Designer 7 Premium takes a traditional animator's approach to Flash animation. You create
key frames (or "snap-shots") of your animation through time, and Xara Web Designer 7 Premium
automatically creates all the in-between frames for you, a process called 'tweening'.
An example start frame
The next key frame has the star shape moved, rotated a little, reduced in size, and changed to a different
color.
Xara Web Designer 7 Premium will create a smoothly animated Flash file automatically creating the
interim frames. This process is called "tweening".
What Flash can and cannot do
The Flash format does not support some of the advanced effects that Xara Web Designer 7 Premium
offers, for example complex graduated transparency, feathering and most of the advanced color fill
types.
However, it does support a range of effects that include simple transparency. So, for example, if you fade
the star on the 2nd key frame above to be 100% transparent, you'll get an animation where the star
moves, reduces in size, and then fades.
The same example, showing in-between frames, but with a transparency change.
Like Xara Web Designer 7 Premium, 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 Web Designer 7 Premium 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.
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