Export transparent animated GIFs from After Effects/AME
Currently, if I want to export a “sticker” (Animated GIF with transparency) for social media, I animate the GIF in After Effects, export a MOV with alpha, via the AE renderer, bring that MOV into Photoshop and export a GIF with transparency via the (legacy) web export. This is a lengthy, complicated process that creates a heavy and useless, for the end product, MOV file.
In my opinion there are multiple things wrong with this workflow and could be improved by allowing direct export of transparent GIFs from AE.
The Adobe export/render preference for most formats is via AME
Issue: Formats including Alpha, can only be exported from AE directly. This breaks the standard workflow. Improvements to/ development of the AE renderer have been stopped.Animated GIFs can only be exported from AME without transparency
Issue: In order to export a GIF with transparency, an additional step has to be performed, thus breaking the standard workflow.The web export in Photoshop is a “legacy” export. Does this mean it will at some point be obsolete?
Issue: If Adobe decides to make this export method obsolete and remove it from Photoshop, there will be no other option to export “stickers”.
Sonja Geracsek
shared this idea
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Yakiv Syrytsia
commented
Actually, you can now! We've developed a free script for After Effects that exports GIFs in 1 click. It's called AEJuice GIF. You can download it and learn more at this blog post https://aejuice.com/blog/how-to-make-a-gif-in-after-effects/?utm_source=adoveuservoice_comment
After installation, go to Window - AEJuice GIF.jsxbin (on the bottom). Open a composition, press Render in the script. It will export a GIF animation and open it after a render.
You should be good to go with default settings but in case you'd like to customize here are a few settings I change:
Export folder - by default, it's your project's folder but you can export all GIFs to a custom folder.
Loop - by default, all GIFs loop forever but you can loop it once, twice, etc.
Alpha channel - by default, it's off but sometimes you might need a transparent background.
Comps\Folders - sometimes you might need to export a lot of compositions at once so you might need to switch to the folder from compositions.
Change width - this one is rarer but I use it sometimes. It will change all auto-resize to the specified one.
There are a lot of advanced settings but I never use them.