7. The Menus

7.9 The Web Menu

7.9.1 The Dynamic Animation

7.9.1.1 Basics

Introduction

Animations are an often used element of web pages. Dynamic Animation is a comparably simple way to create quite complex animations. The layers of a document can be moved, rotated, scaled and faded in and out. This has been possible with the old Create Animation function, too, but while there all steps of the animation are calculated fix at once, the Dynamic Animation only stores commands, that can be edited later very simply.

In PhotoLine a Dynamic Animations is build from two main parts:

PhotoLine can export Dynamic Animations as GIF- and as SWF-file. If Quicktime support is activated, export as MOV-file is possible, too.

On saving an animation as GIF-file you should use a color reduction scheme (see chapter 7.10.1.14), that replaces transparency by a color (usually white), because this way the resulting file will be smaller.

Very important: if you intend to edit a Dynamic Animation later (you normally want to do that), you have to save the animation as PLD-file, because only the PLD-format can save Dynamic Animations without loosing information. If you save your animation only as GIF-, SWF- or MOV-file, you will not be able to edit it later.

The "Dynamic Animation" Dialog

The main dialog of the Dynamic Animation has 3 parts:

The Working Area

The dominating part of the working area is the track-list. It shows all tracks of the animations. At the top edge of the track-list a time-bar, that shows the time in second. At the left side of every track there is a small field, where a small eye-icon can be used to turn display of the track on or off. The state of the eye-icon will not be saved, but it will be used for preview and export of the animation.

The sequences are shown as pink bars in the tracks. Every sequence has a small preview of the connected layer. If the connected layer is a subanimation (more of this later), additionally a small film-strip is displayed.

If the mouse is moved to the edge of a sequence, it becomes a . This visualizes, that the start- and the end-time of the sequence can be changed. If 2 sequences lie next to each other, the end-time of the first one and the start-time of the second one will be changed synchronously. If you don‘t want this behaviour, you will have to manually create a space between the sequences either by moving one of the sequences or by using the Sequence Properties-dialog which will be explained later.

If you click on a sequence, it will be displayed red and a small slider appears at the bottom edge. This way it becomes the active sequence. Additionally the corresponding layer will be selected in the document and in the layer-list. The slider is very important for editing sequences. First it can be used to inspect the behaviour of a sequence. By changing its value the layer in the document changes accordingly to the settings of the sequence. If you defined, that a layer should move from the left to the right, the layer will be moved by using the slider, too. Second the slider can be used to transfer the current state of the layer to the sequence for the current slider position. Usually you use this function to define the layer appearance at the sequence start and at the sequence end. But you can create midpoints, too. Midpoints are shown as small rhombs in the slider. This will be described more detailed later. If the length of a sequence is modified, the midpoints will be scaled accordingly. This can be prevented by holding the Ctrl-key.

Sequences have a context menu, too. It contains the following commands:

Beside that there is an icon bar in the working area. It contains the following commands:

First Steps

If you want to create an Dynamic Animation, you should first consider the size of the animation, for example typical advertisement banner on web pages have a size of about 400x80 pixels. After that you should create a document with that size. Now you have to use Create Edit/Animation (see chapter 7.9.1.2). Here you can set up the duration of the animation. After leaving the dialog with OK a single track is created. Furthermore the document will switch to document mode, if it has been in picture mode previously.

If you want to create a small animation containing a text scrolling in from the top, you should proceed like this:

If you now press the play-button in the preview area, you should see the text layer moving accordingly to your commands.

You can fade in and out or make the layer larger and smaller analogously.

Subanimations

Subanimations are needed for more complex animations. Imagine the following: a text rotates around one of its axis and - while doing this - it moves backwards, so that it gets smaller and smaller. This text has to be animated in two ways: it rotates around its axis and it gets smaller. Such cases are solved by using subanimations.

The proceeding is something like this:

Now your text layer rotating and moving backwards is completed.