Export Settings For Animated GIF

There is something fundamentally wrong with the fact that After Effects is used for motion animations, and yet the export workflow for the most commonly used animation formats takes you from AE to Media Encoder, to Photoshop...

There is a preset for animated GIF in Media Encoder - it should work.  Adobe pros are here with workarounds and links to third party solutions that can get the job done - exporting from AE.

This is just another example of a really broken set of product interactions, where everyone on the web is using a set of file protocols and Adobe is not paying attention to how their customers make them. It's true of GIF, Lottie, webp and several others. What will it take for someone at Adobe to wake up to what's going on? 

I had a logo intro project where I wanted it as a gif for my Behance project. By reading through all the comments, I decided I'll try to use photoshop as recommended in most of the answer but didn't work for me. So I decided I'll use Media Encoder and it worked for me very well. 

1. First I exported the video as Avi from after effects and then pushed it to Media Encoder. 
2. With the inbuilt presets that Media Encoder comes with, I navigated to the Gif options in the Presets Browser where I first chose the "Gif Sequence preset." It didn't work. This option outputs the file into hundreds of files which was shocking to me .
3. I chose the second option which is "Animated Gif preset" which worked like magic.
4. The gif was well output and all animations were as smooth as I expected.

Someone else can try this and can share the results. 

Wow...this worked great. I've been trying for an hour to figure out a way to do this and this worked great!

Here's the most efficient way to generate an animated gif in After Effects

1. Plan your animation and set times for all transitions and movement as well as the time for the parts of the animation that have no movement
2. Create an 8bit Project and a GIF sized comp, preferably with an even number of pixels in each row and column long enough to accommodate the animation and 12 or 15 fps is plenty for an animated gif
3. Set up the animations in the usual way except when you complete an animation - say something like a 1/2 second move in from the left for a new graphic, set the hero position keyframe, move forward 1 frame and then start the next transition. You will set the duration of the single still frame later in Photoshop
4. When your animation is complete and every section that is not moving is only one second long, set the work area to the last frame of the animation and trim comp to the work area
5. Send the comp to the Render Cue, NOT the Media Encoder and render the comp using the default LOSSLESS or LOSSLESS With Alpha preset (if you need transparency in the GIF) in the output module. Do Not Use H.264 or any other interframe compression scheme if you want good color dithering because the color will be encoded in blocks of at least 4 pixels with each block having the same color value - that's how h.264 4.2.2 or 4.2.0 color works and there is nothing you can do about it
6. Open the lossless render in Photoshop and open the Motion workspace
7. Examine the timeline, step through the transitions one frame at a time and when you get to a spot where you want to hold for a few seconds set the duration for that frame. Animated GIF's are the only format that I know of that let you set the duration of each frame
8. When everything looks good and you like the timing export the Animated GIF - This is where you get to choose the kind of dithering, transparency, and other options. You don't have transparency options with h.264 or most other formats.

That's about it. You could create an animated GIF with 10 half-second transitions and 10 slides that ran for 4 seconds each that only had 70 frames @ 12 fps or 90 frames at 15 instead of a file that had a minimum of 240 frames. That's how to use AE to generate an animated GIF.

Moving to After Effects​