artifacts in animated GIFs

[petertahoe]

I created a composition in Illustrator and animated some elements in After Effects. There is an expression to ghet a flicker effect and some animated fire works. When I export as an Animated GIF from AE, I get lots of artifacts across the entire image.  Before you say, "do it in Photoshop", a lot of work and many layers went into the original Illustrator composition. Any suggestions? When I export the same clip an Mp4, there is no artifact issue.

Thanks

[Rick Gerard]

Try rendering a movie, not an MP4, using the High-Quality Output Module preset in the Render Queue, then open the Movie in Photoshop, change the workspace to motion, remove any duplicate frames, adjust the timing of each frame if needed, then have Photoshop render the animated GIF. You have a lot more color options and control than you can get trying to render a GIF in After Effects.

If you want to be completely efficient when creating an animated give, make sure that there are no duplicate frames in the AE comp. You can set any single frame to any length in Photoshop and dramatically reduce the file size.

[petertahoe]

I did import into Photoshop and got better results of the Exported GIF. Still some artifacts but this will become part of my workflow and I'll continue to fine tune. Thank you for your reply

[ShiveringCactus]

A while back, I looked into all the different ways I could think of to produce a GIF from After Effects.  I'm sharing it here because you talk of fine tuning, so I thought it might help:

[SamDavePollard]

Your video totally solved my problem with artefacts in gifs made by Media Encoder. Many Thanks.

[ShiveringCactus]

You're very welcome.  I'm glad it helped you.

[OussK]

I think https://ezgif.com/optimize is the best tools to create and optimise GIF

[Elwira29635290fh5h]

How can I export H.264 MP4 video file with transparency?

[ShiveringCactus]

Unfortunately H.246 MP4 files can't be exported with a transparency.  Your best option is to export using Quicktime ProRes 4444.  This will make a large video file though, so at that point web-based converters might be ruled out.

You might be better looking at a plugin like AEJuice and exporting from After Effects directly.  In the video, I mention I made a gallery of options, you can check that out here:

https://shiveringcactus.net/gifs