Present & animate

Any document with two or more pages plays as a presentation. Pixara animates what changes from one page to the next — Magic Move — and the same animation exports as a video.

Present

1. Start it. Once a document has more than one page, the Share button becomes a menu with Export… and Present. On the Mac, or an iPad with a keyboard, ⌥⌘P — View › Start Presentation.
2. It plays from page 1, each page scaled to fit on black — on the Mac, filling the window. Anything hanging over the edge of a page is cut off.
3. Move through it at your own pace: nothing advances on its own.

The controls — ‹, the page number, › — fade after a moment and come back with a tap in the middle. A thin bar along the bottom fills in, one segment per page. With Reduce Motion on, pages switch without animating.

Magic Move

• Linked elements morph. An element on one page can be linked to an element of the same type on the next. Going forward, it glides from its old place, size and look into the new one; going back, it plays in reverse.
• What animates: position, size and rotation, the points of a line or freeform, opacity, fill colours and gradients, corner radius, stroke width, blur, drop and inner shadows, and the values of a chart. A different text, photo or drawing is swapped in, not morphed.
• The rest cross-fades. Page-level elements with no link fade out and the new ones fade in — as long as the two pages share at least one link. With no link between them, the page simply cuts to the next.
• Duplicate Page links everything for you. Every element on the copy, the ones inside groups too, is linked to its original. Move, resize or recolour things on the copy and that is already the animation.

The Animate Pages timeline

Open it with ⌥⇧⌘P, with Animate Pages under Animations in the Design tab (nothing selected), or with Animate in the page settings on iPhone. It needs two or more pages.

• The pages run top to bottom, each with its number and thumbnail. Between two pages a pill reads "Tap to animate" or the number of animations; tap it to open that transition.
• Each link is a card with the element on both pages and three controls: Speed, from 0 to 5 seconds (0.6 s to start with), Delay, from 0 to 3 seconds, and Curve — Smooth, Linear, or Bounce, which overshoots and settles.
• Animate an element, at the end of a transition, links two elements by hand: pick one under From and its partner under To, and they are linked as soon as both are picked. Only elements at the top level of the page can be linked, and both must be the same type — a text to a text, a group to a group.
• The ✕ on a card stops animating that element: after you confirm, it fades in on the next page instead.
• The clock on each page sets how long it stays on screen in a video: from a quarter of a second to ten seconds, or Custom…; two seconds to start with. Present ignores it.
• The Share button at the top plays the Presentation, or opens Export with Video already picked.

Export as a video

Share › Export… › Video, or Export from the timeline's Share button. A video needs at least two pages, and like every export except Pixara's own file, it is part of Pro.

• Each page stays on screen for its duration, then moves to the next with the speed, delay and curve set in the timeline. In a video, pages with no links between them cross-fade instead of cutting.
• Pick some of the pages to make a shorter video. It takes the size of the first page you export.
• Render Video shows its progress as it goes. The video is silent: there is no sound in a Pixara document.

See also

• 📄 Pages
• 📤 Export, Recents & sync