Xara Photo & Graphics Designers 11 out - still does not work properly with MEP

browj2 wrote on 6/30/2015, 1:35 PM

Xara Photo & Graphics Designer 11 just came out and I tried it with MEP2015 Premium and VPX7 hoping that they had fixed the problem with the animation interface. They have not and this is most disappointing. I have raised another ticket with Magix about this, or at least I think I did because the instant reply was in Spanish.

In MEP (or VPX6 or 7), right-click on a video object, Video effects, Create overlay graphics/ animations... - opens Xara, usually in Animation mode (but sometimes not - bug), create a shape, give it a name, click on Copy in the Animation gallery, which should advance the video by 0.5s by default (you can change thist). However, the video does not advance; it stays on the same frame. Then move the shape and or stretch it, Copy, move/stretch or whatever, repeat over the length of the video clip, exit. This should create a XAR animation in MEP but it doesn't. It creates a static shape of the form and at the location of the last changed shape. Thus it creates an overlay but no animation. This animation worked properly in Xara version 9 or Designer Pro X9, but not in 10 or 11.

Until Magix/Xara fix this, I see no point in upgrading to v11, unless it is for other purposes.

Does anyone know of a way to have Xara 9 and Xara 10 or 11 on the same computer but have MEP/VPX open version 9 instead of 11 when using the above command?

Note that this is not one of the parameters that can be set in the Program settings folders; it appears to be built in to open the latest Xara if it exists on the computer.

Comments

browj2 wrote on 7/21/2015, 12:23 PM

Xara Designer Pro X11 is now out and I have been trying out the registered trial version, 64bit. After some teething problems, like DPX11 would not open from MEP2015 Premium, it now does. It seems that a test with MEP2014Plus adjusted something and now it works with 2015 and VPX7.

Unfortunately, the animation mode still does not advance the video frame and an animation is not returned to MEP. Ticket still open with Magix and I have noted this on the Xara site.

I noticed an interesting feature in Xara that I had not noticed before. There is a Share item in the top menu, Send to video, and a list of installed video programs. The video program needs to be open. If you draw something, select it and send it to MEP, it will append it as a transparent png file. If more than one object in Xara, then a png file will be sent for each object. Grouping the objects sends the group in one file. Thus making up objects and getting them directly into MEP can be done two way. The second way saves the png to a User Xara Appdata folder so the file can be copied and used elsewhere.