7.0

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.
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
Web Designer 7 Premium. It is also possible to tween shape outlines and some Photo Tool
attributes in Xara Web Designer 7 Premium, but these are less common and only applicable to specific
types of object.
One thing that isn't possible is to change the shape of an object between key frames.
It's not possible to change the shape between key frames.
Because the shape changes (i.e. it morphs from one shape to another), this is not possible in Xara Web
Designer 7 Premium Flash animations.
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