after effects animation turns blurry in media encoder

Report · Apr 13, 2022

I have an illustrator logo that I gave a simple fade in/out effect in after effects. I want to save it as a gif loader for my website, so I saved it as a gif in media encoder. but for some reason.. the quality is terrible. the gif is blurry. I've tried to change the size of the ai elements but that didnt do anything. Am I missing something?

Report · Apr 13, 2022

nevermind! for anyone running into this issue. Try to make your AI file size larger. mine was only 360x360 px.. i scaled it up to 2000px. save it and re-import it to after effects. should solve the problem. 🙂

Report · Apr 15, 2022

Glad you figured it out. In the future, you can save yourself a little effort and use the "Continuously Rasterize" layer switch in the timeline (it looks like a little sun icon) on Illustrator layers. This will allow you to scale them infinitely while retaining vector quality.

There are limitations with this approach as it changes the order After Effects renders things (this is a much more complicated subject), but a common example is that you can't use the Puppet effect and then scale a layer up with the CR switch enabled. Check out this video to learn a little more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSWWq-PNMMs