How to make a GIF smaller in dimension without the quality

[claudel84161621]

Hello,

Let me start with informing you that I am very new to After Effects.

I design mostly for print & sign, so at digital design I'm not very skilled.

For my company I wanted to make an animated logo to put into our mail footer.

I succeeded at making the animation and exporting it as a gif trough Media Encoder, but when I add the GIF to the mail, it's massive in dimensions (not the file size, this is about 1,7 MB). I takes up half of the screen.

Each time I try to reduce the dimensions, I end up with a smaller version but with less detail and loss of quality.

Is there a setting I'm missing or is this just how GIF's work?

[Mylenium]

GIF is a very limited format, AE is terribel at rendering it and your workflow overall is less than ideal. The proper way to do it would be to render a clip or image sequence and import that in the Photoshop timeline, then export it from there with Save for Web. That way you can control the color palette, dithering and other factors, none of which is possible directly in AE. You can also try various online GIF creation tools or alternative programs, of course.

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard]

When you create an Animated Gif using After Effects, you should set the frame rate to 15 or even 12 fps. Set the frame size you want to use for your GIF making sure that you have an even number of pixels high and wide.

When creating animated GIFs, you should make sure there are no duplicate frames. Your logo animation has a simple move that lasts about 3 seconds and a pause that lasts for about 3 seconds. At 15 fps, the composition should be 46 frames long. Set the outpoint to the last frame of the animation. Export the animation using the High-Quality setting in the Render Queue/Output module. Open the rendered movie file in Photoshop and change the workspace to Motion. In this workspace, you can see every frame in the animation in the timeline, and you can set the duration of each frame.  Go to frame 46 and set the duration to 3 seconds. 

I have made many animated gifs that last for more than a minute. Most of my moves are about 8 frames (about a half second), and most of my pauses are 5 to 8 seconds. Using this workflow, you can create an animated GIF that will run more than a minute and is only about 40 frames long. When the timeline is complete use the File/Export/Save For Web (Legacy) menu to finalize and export your file.

There are much better tools for creating Animated Gifs than After Effects. A professional workflow always involves ensuring you do not have duplicate frames in the animation. 

You also need to be very careful with the positioning of thin lines and colors. Everything should align perfectly with the pixel grid. You only have 256 total colors to work with. Your sample is only 2 colors. Setting that in the export settings will also reduce the file size.

I downloaded your large gif, deleted all frames after 48, set the duration of all frames to .08 (12 fps) instead of the .3 (24) that you had, set the duration of frame 48 to 10 seconds, set the colors to 2 and resized the frame to even pixels in Photoshop. This reduced the file size from 1,746,969 bytes (1.7 MB on disk) to 767,997 bytes (770 KB on disk). This is the final file:

I also attached it so you can download it and take a look. It took less time to fix the file than to write this post. I would also suggest you work a bit on easing and speeding up the move. A typical move like this usually should take a little less than 1 second or about 12 frames. 

[claudel84161621]

Thank you for this detailed explanation.

I downloaded your file but when I put it in my mail footer it still is quite large (I'm not talking about file size in KB, but the actual dimensions on screen).

Is there any fix to make the dimenions itself smaller?

[Rick Gerard]

If you are creating graphics for the web, you need to set the comp size to the final size of your desired graphic. In video and on the web, image size is always in pixels. If you want the graphic to be 200 pixels wide when attached to an email, you need to make the comp 200 pixels wide. You will also have to adjust the width of the strokes in the illustration you are adding so that the horizontal and vertical lines in the design are precisely lined up on the pixel grid and a whole number of pixels (points in illustrator) thick or you will end up with lines that are the wrong color as they are interpreted. 

The project file I shared was not resized or modified to create a GIF suitable to attach as an email signature. You'll have to start over with an appropriately sized logo.

[Mylenium]

Create a new composition with the desired output size, drop the source composition into it and sclae it accordingly.

Precomposing, nesting, and pre-rendering After Effects compositions

Mylenium

[ShiveringCactus]

This question had bothered me for a while, so I ended up testing all the options I could think of to simply, with minimal effort work out the best approach.

In the end, it came down to what options you have available (software, website privacy converns etc...)