let me walk you through exporting your video and turning it into an animated GIF. And so this is a project that I created earlier for a flat animation challenge. So hopefully you follow it along and welcome for those of you coming from that. So if you want to anime and or export as a Jiff, you can't actually do that straight from after effects. What you first have to do is export a video and then bring that into photo shop. So I know that it's a little tricky. But if you have created the Creative cloud version of After effects, most of you will also have access to Photoshop which comes with your Creative Cloud subscription. So first choose the composition that you want to export and go to composition add to render queue. This is how we exported earlier. So you already learned that in a previous lesson. But if you're coming straight to this one, just click this lossless button down there and we want to change our format is something that's going to be a little bit smaller so easier to w...

ork with and you can do that by clicking format options and changing the video codex from animation to H 264 which is a high quality quicktime file. Leave the quality at 100 click OK click OK. And now to choose where you're going to save it. So you can find it after exports click on the output to and then the composition text and just name it and choose the folder where you want to export it to and then click save now to actually render it out, click this render button and that's going to actually export it. So rendering in after effects means exports basically. So once that's done, we can go to that folder and then we have this quicktime movie file. So this is just a video though, it's not an animated GIF and we want to create that animated GIF that we can post online and it loops forever basically. So to do that, we need to open up this movie file in Photoshop. So you can literally just take this video clip and drag it into your photo shop app or you can right click it and say open with Photoshop. So right click and open with. Now this might look different on Pcs but on a Mac you would say open with and then click other and then choose Photoshop. When you open up a video in Photoshop, you're going to have this timeline tab down here. And so this is good if you want to make it shorter. So I exported this entire video but maybe I want to make it a little shorter. So maybe four seconds. So I can take the end of this and drag it in like that. That's your sort of play area, your work area in Photoshop and now it's only going to export that area to save as a Jif go up to file export and I still use the save for web legacy option because it's an easy way to choose your Jif settings or gift however you pronounce it, it might take a few seconds to load because it's bringing in all of that video data. So just be patient and let it load. But while we're letting it load we can see all of our settings on the right. So down below you have actually this is good to start from below. We might want to change our animation from looping once to looping forever. And then the image size typically don't need it to be 1920 by 10 80 for online. So maybe we just want to set the with 1000 and once we do that, nothing happens. But if we click anywhere else, if we click onto another setting it's going to process that and then it's going to change the image to pixels wide And you see that this is linked. So because we set the width to 1000, the height is going to be 563, it automatically decreases that the right amount while this is processing. And you'll notice that the size of the Jif is down here in the bottom left. And so this is 523 kB which is pretty small, which is good. You definitely want somewhere below one megabyte if possible. Below two is even better. And so if your animation is too big, you can either change the size of the canvas or you can change the quality up here. So here you have your gift settings and you can also from here this menu, you can change it to jpeg PNG and if you didn't actually, the thing is you should change this to Jeff. That's the first thing you have to save it as or choose. It might have been on jpeg, so make sure you change that to Jeff and then you can play around with these settings. The color setting is an important one to look at because basically what this is doing is allowing a certain amount of colors to be in your your image. Because this the animation we created has very few colors. We can actually drop this down and it will still look good because literally there's only like 10 or so colors in this from the background to the cabin colors. So if we drop this down to 32, it's gonna process it again. But it still looks pretty good. You get a little bit of that animated gif picks isolation in there, but the size of the Jeff also in decrease, which is nice. So this is one thing that you can do to increases the quality, but it also increases the the size. So you have to kind of balance what you want. So if you want it to be really small, maybe choose something that's a little bit lower. You can also change the dither percentage, dropping it down a lot. You'll see it kind of decreases depending on what your video looks like. It will decrease the blending of the colors or increase if you're making an animated GIF of a video clip, this will look a lot different than this sort of flat animation to preview how this is going to look. Just click this preview button and it's going to open up your web browser and show you what this looks like. Now I actually realized that once I change these settings, it changed the looping options back to once. So let's check forever and now preview again. Nice. So that's looking pretty darn good, you know? But with only eight or 16 colors, you see that we don't get that the difference in the color of the hills and the trees and this path up here. So I'm going to increase the colors. I think actually 2 56 is fine because under one megabyte is perfectly fine with me And dithering. I want to set back to 88%. So now let's preview this. That looks pretty good and it's looping infinitely. So once we're happy with all of those settings, click save, it's going to ask you where you want to save it, Set your settings and your name and your folder and click save. Now you can take this animation and upload it to really any website. So if you're watching this course on U. two me wherever you're watching it. Please share your own animation with us as this animated gif. Cool. Thank you so much for watching. Let me know if you have any questions and we'll see you in another lesson.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Practice Files

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Philip Ebiner

Professional video & course creator, photographer & teacher to 1mil+ students; 10+ years experience with 1000+ videos.

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Create an Animated GIF from After Effects CC 2017

Create an Animated GIF from After Effects CC 2017

Lesson Info

96. Create an Animated GIF from After Effects CC 2017

Lessons

Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates

Understand the After Effects Workspace

Starting a New Composition

CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage

Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline

Using the Basic After Effects Tools

Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors

Working in the Timeline

Layer Properties

Quiz: After Effects Basics

Animating in After Effects

Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations

Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral

Using the Graph Editor

Challenge - Bouncing Ball

Solution - Bouncing Ball

Quiz: Animating with Keyframes

Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects

Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths

Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients

Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag

Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers

Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear

Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers

Easily Reverse Complicated Animations

Playing with Time

Blend Modes

Stabilize Shaky Footage

CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts

CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time

CC 2019 Content Aware Fill

CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates

Quiz: Important After Effects Skills

Intro to Motion Graphics Projects

Clean Lower Third

Logo Reveal Animation Bumper

Colorful Transition

Text with Mask Path Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Weather App 1

Weather App 2

Weather App 3

Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects

Flat Animation Challenge

Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene

Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect

Removing Green Screen Background

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect

Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge

Intro to 3D

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Build Out Your 3D Composition

Animating Our 3D Scene

Create Stars in After Effects

Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)

Using the Rotoscope Tool

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation

Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool

Easy Screen Replacement with Masks

Replacing a Screen Version 2

Screen Replacement with Mocha

CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin

Quiz: Rotoscoping

Using the Puppet Pin Tool

Animating Your Puppet Pins

Animated Blinking Eyes

Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds

CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool

Quiz: Screen Replacements

Applying Text Animation Presets

Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn