Corel Rave can't create a correct TRANSPARANT BACKGROUND

[Frank Buurman]

Hi there

I'm trying Rave... it's beautiful and really better to use in combination with Corel Draw then Flash. What I like is the ease to create seperate movements for different objects, and some graphic possibillities, Flash hasn't... despite al functionality Flash has in creating interactivity, and all plugins for Flash.

I've already some spectacular results, so I'm convinced to use it for many animations ... except one thing...
I can't get transparancy in my animated gif export.
In my rave file I've selected 'no background (color)'
I tried everything mentioned in the program and online help.
Setting the transparancy color (white) for each frame in the export dialog box gives transparancy, ok, yes.
(removing colors from the palette didn't work, trying a workaround with Photopaint neither).
But in the resulting animation, all frames that are played in the timeline stay in the animation, the previous frames don't disappear but stay on stage until the last keyframe is reached, in that frame the animation plays one time ok (with all previous frames visible as 'shadows' behind, then the playing starts again

I also tried other options in exporting to gif, like changing the palette, modifying the file options, but nothing works...
Could you please help me out, I really want to use Rave, but I also need to create animated gifs with transparancy.
Saving them as seperate bitmaps is not a good option withthe original keystrokes, I tried some things.
Do you have a solution ?
Thanks a lot !! :)
Frank


Trying the setting 'replace with background' for each frame solved the problem - but it's not the ease I'm used with older gifcreation programs, like good old MicrografX.

[cjoe]

try adding alot of layers in rave with alot of complex animation and a machine with less than 2gb of ram and see what happens. Your system goes into meltdown, rave eats ram faster than god knows what. I love Corel stuff but i use flash for animations. Draw has a great swf export filter (thanks broacher) that you can use.

[Broacher]

When Rave first came out, I too was excited with the prospects of working in a CorelDraw drawing environment to do Flash work but the reality quickly set in that this was not ready for primetime. And while things have improved considerably since version 1, I would still never recommend this app for any serious Flash work. I think the major difference in these apps can be attributed to the direction from which they approach the Flash standard. Flash started with the main focus on keeping everything small and tight to work in low bandwidth situations. The Flash drawing tools support this with their semi-automatic preference to 'flatten' complex vector shapes whenever possible as you work, and just a whole array of tools to keep things reduced to their absolute minimum when possible, while you're actually constructing the files.

Corel's going the other way, trying to accomodate tools evolved for a more graphically complex print environment and the tools just don't 'fit' as easily. And you get a feeling that rather than write new routines to translate native Corel objects into Flash ones in the most efficient manner while drawing, that instead they've just come up with a handful of brute force conversion subs to handle this at the output stage--and that's why the results are relatively bloated and buggy-- in other words, not very usable at all.

But as Cjoe mentioned, you can at least do your object drawing in Draw and port them out to SWFs easy enough. This can work, as long as you're careful to not get carried away with using any of Corel's complex vector effects in the process--or if you do, learn how to optimize them for Flash work.