animated gif

[sueb108623]

How can I export my character animator project as an animated gif?

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

If you do a media export, export as H.264, then that will bring up Adobe Media Encoder window. Before starting the encoder job there, change the encoder to Animated GIF. You can also set the output render size etc as well if you need to scale the image down.

If you click on the second column (mine shows "Animated Gif (Match Source)" above) you can change the settings. If you want to change the resolution, quality etc you can change it here. (You can save presets as well if you want to reuse them.)  If you don't want to match source, untick the checkbox next to the width and height settings.

[alank99101739]

In case helpful, I tried creating a video showing how to export Animated GIF and videos with transparency. The instructions above are probably enough, but I wanted it for future reference (and experimenting). Exporting Animated GIFs and videos with transparency from Character Animator - YouTube

(But I discovered how much time it can take when the tools play up - the video kept playing double speed in Premier Pro - took me hours of fiddling to make the OBS captured screen recordings work correctly - by triming them in different ways until it worked. Bizarre.)

[sueb108623]

Thank you - that worked, but I lost the transparent background in the process. Is there a setting for that? I looked around but didn’t see one.

[alank99101739]

There was an “alpha” checkbox, but it did not work for me. Seemed like you could generate a gif alpha mask and merge them using prem pro... but I would just use QuickTime/go pro cineform with alpha in that case. If you get it going, please let me know!

[alank99101739]

Oh, my quick reading last night was GIF does support transparency if you reserve one pallet entry for transparency. I tried using some premier pro effects as well to turn the background color into a transparency, but it Seems the background black was the same as other black in the image (so the eye pupils became transparent). Basically it seemed the generation of the animated gif was wrong for transparency, not the display. I gave up at that point. Best I could think of was to put a chroma key green background as others have done - if you really need Gif. But that requires magic when displaying it.

or raise an adobe bug report! Maybe its not hard to fix...