issue when exporting gif in ME from AE, all black

[Zachary24385720c3rs]

Hi all, I have been making these animated mandalas and have had no issue with exporting them as a gif file until now. The resulting file is complete blackness. I'd love some feed back on what I can do to fix this issue. im running a mac system on Big Sur and AE 22. like mentioned I had no issue exporting as a gif through ME before. Still frame of what I am trying to achieve

[Rick Gerard]

To be completely honest, the Media Encoder should be your last choice for rendering an animated GIF. I would render a Lossless with Alpha video using the Media Encoder and the Output Module templates (just Lossless if there is no transparency). Then I would open the movie in Photoshop, use the Motion workspace, then set the duration for each frame and eliminate all duplicate frames to save file size, then use the Legacy Save for Web to export a proper animated GIF. There is no reason at all for any Animated GIF to have two identical frames because with the right software you can set the duration of frame 1 to 15-seconds, then frame 2 through 10 to .1-second, then frame 11 to 15-seconds, then frame 12 through 22 to .1-second. You will end up with a 32.2-second looping animated Gif that is only 22 frames long with very tiny file size and almost instantaneous download speed. The same animation exported from After Effects would be 300 times larger.

[Zachary24385720c3rs]

I appreciate your response, however i scrubbed through existing gif files with same technique of exporting through ME, I made and I see no duplicate frames. I think you might have been confused with what I am doing. I am making individual frames in AI, then bringing them into after effects. You might be thinking I am making the frames within AE itself, which would export with more frames than my technique.