Xara Webster - Creating the Animated GIF From the Bitmap Gallery (text body)

Creating the animated GIF

After you have built up the animation as a series of frames in the Frame Gallery, you can preview the animation before saving the animated GIF to disk.

Sorting the frames

Open the Frame Gallery if it's not already open. Sort the frames into the correct order, with the first frame at the bottom. Although it's easy to drag and drop frames around in the gallery, it's a good idea to create your frames in correct order in any case.

Previewing the animated GIF

You can quickly preview your animated GIF from within Xara Webster. Click the Preview button on the Frame Gallery to open the Preview window. You can use this window to run the complete animation or examine individual frames. This is particularly useful when you have color reduced the GIF (there's more about this later).

You can also preview the animation in your browser. This is particularly useful for checking looping and frame delays. Click Properties in the Frame Gallery then click the Preview in Browser tab. Click Browser Preview to send the GIF to the browser.

Saving the animated GIF

Select Export Animated GIF on the File menu. This displays the normal Save dialog box. The Options button is described later.

Excluding frames from the animation

You might not want all the frames to appear in the animation. For example, you might want to create two slightly different animations from the same document. In this case right-click on the frames you want to exclude. This pops-up a menu. Deselect Show Frame and the frame is marked as Hidden.

Or you might want to save objects as part of the document but not show them in the animated GIF. In this case you could move them a frame which you mark as hidden.

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