Prototyping with transparent videos

Still actual, plz fix

Still seeing this bug. It’s not just unsupported, there’s actual bug behavior. If it’s not currently supported, maybe consider throwing a message or not allowing the user to add the webm video in the first place.

It still wouldn’t work but at least it would properly set expectations.

Every time I try to do something in Figma I encounter nonsense. Please fix such logic issues instead of wasting your time with plugins like stupid cursor appearance changer! Also, this video feature has been around for a long time and your APIs still do not support full capability for the video feature.

veeeery annoying issue 🫤 How difficult is that to solve?

Hey everyone, thank you for taking your time to leave your feedback!

For a reminder the team has confirmed that transparent videos aren’t currently supported in Figma, that’s why I’ve changed the topic of this post from “Ask the community” to “Share an idea”.

Please feel free to upvote this post and keep the feedback coming in. This helps us roadmap future updates.

Thanks,
Gayani

Same here. Crazy it works ONCE and then the bg appears 🤯

Oh this is bad. It makes using videos unusable for any branded/themed designs at all.

Please fix this Figma

I did some investigating and discovered that when you create a fresh transparent video file (hevc mp4 at least, maybe vp9 webm too) transparency works perfectly in Edit mode and Prototype mode.

Transparency gets lost if you:

• Duplicate the layer (duplicate will lose transparency)
• Change selection to a duplicate that is broken, then go back selecting previously working layer
• Likely other actions

Things tried to revive transparency, but failed:

• Reloading tab
• Deleting video layer and dragging video file again into the same Figma file
• Creating a fresh new Draft file and dragging the video there (if transparency for this file was lost previously, even the first drag is instantly black)
• Renaming the file in OS and dragging that into Figma (agian instantly black)
• Switching between desktop app and browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox)

Once transparency is lost - can’t revive it.

Feels like Figma is trying to cache videos or something, getting rid of transparency in the process. Even though it is already fully capable of displaying them properly.

Since the capability is already there, this is likely to be low effort fix for dev team at Figma.

Another buggy behavior, possibly related (if caching is the cause of all this):

After I drag a second video into Figma, it’s layer name will display incorrect file name, showing the file name of the very first video that was ever dragged into that Figma file. Even if that layer was already deleted.

In the above image I first:

1. Dragged CCV Logo Outro - White - Transparent - hevc-safari.mp4
2. Deleted it’s layer CCV Logo Outro - White - Transparent - hevc-safari
3. Dragged CCV Logo Outro - White - Transparent - vp9-chrome.webm

The new layer got name CCV Logo Outro - White - Transparent - hevc-safari 1 instead of ...vp9-chrome

Notice the 1 as well. Figma thought it already had an exact copy, so it appended a 1.

Just sad how this became the reason I had to stop using Figma here at Instagram. We have a bunch of animated assets I can’t recreate in Figma and importing the transparent AE animations would solve that.

would appreciate this being fixed as well 🫶