Exporting animations as AVI

As well as exporting animations as animated GIFs, you can also export in the .AVI file format.

In an animation document, choose Export Animation from the File menu, and choose AVI animation (*.AVI) from the Save As Type drop-down list in the Export File dialog. Click the Options button to choose the export settings, or just click the Export button to use the current or default settings.

AVI options

Codec selection

Use the dropdown list to select from the range of codecs that you have installed. This determines how your AVI is encoded and compressed. Or choose the "uncompressed" option if you want to export an uncompressed AVI. Note that this will give you a very large file size!

Key frame every N frames

The default value is provided by the selected codec and it's normally best to keep that value. Reducing the number will tend to result in higher quality but larger files, increasing it in lower quality smaller files.

Frame Rate

Leaving the frame rate at the default 25 frames per second will result in a smooth animation, but you may be able to get away with a lower rate of say 12 or 15 frames per second if your movie is fairly static with little fast moving action. This will reduce the file size.

Configure

Pressing the Configure button opens a settings dialog specific to the selected codec (if available), which may give you more configuration options. The About button tells you more about the selected codec.

Make background transparent

Selecting this option will make your AVI have a transparent background, which is useful if you want your animation to appear on top of a movie (for movie titling, for example).

When this option is on, the codec list is reduced to show only the "uncompressed" option, because transparency can't currently be supported using a codec. If you export an uncompressed AVI with transparency, it will import into MAGIX movie editing software and some other movie editing applications with the transparency.

Area to save

Choose whether to save a movie that is the size of your animation page or the size of the animated drawing.

Click OK to export the AVI animation.