Image going dithered when making animated gif

[timw55457607]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can help as this is doing my head in!

I learned how to make some text look andwritten and made an animation which worked reasonably well. I made it in AE, exported to ME and made an animated gif. Now when I try to make a second animation a week later the final result is dithered and crap image quality. When I now re-export the original file it is also coming out rubbish quality. As far as I am aware I haven't changed a single setting but there must be a check box to tick or something, but I am going insane. I have lost count of how many times I have tried.

Can anybody help?

I have uploaded two different animations 

[David Arbor]

AME's GIF export settings are very limited and don't give you much flexibility. There are plug-ins you can use to export GIFs directly from AE, but if you don't want to buy something like GifGun then you can export a video and upload it to a site like EZgif.com. Here you can use a bunch of different compression options to convert your video to a GIF and achieve a balance of quality, file size, frame rate, and pixel dimensions. 

[timw55457607]

Thank you David. As it happens I had considered exporting to video and then trying to convert from that (although my first conversion to Quicktime just came out totally black!) but what is doing my head in is that the first animation I made was fine so a simple setting must have changed somewhere. I'm getting as far as thinking I need to uninstall both pieces of software and reinstall them.

[David Arbor]

Reinstalling the software isn't going to help here. I wonder if you had selected one of the Transparency options in AME even though you weren't using it? Not sure if setting that from the default of Dithered to None would help. This isn't really dithering, it's low quality artifacts.

Regarding the black, here's my guess of what happened.

1) In AE, you set your Composition background color to white, but not specifically added a white bg layer.

2) You queued the export to AME vs. directly exporting from AE's Render Queue.

If this is what happened then it actually makes sense. AME doesn't respect the AE composition background color, and since you techincally didn't have a background layer, even though you saw white, AME exported a video of black text on a black background. 

Again, if this is what happened, your options would be to either export the video directly from AE via the Render Queue or add a white background layer and queue it again via AME.

[timw55457607]

You are very helpful, David. Let me give your suggestions a go.

Thank you! 🙂