Why can't I export animated gif files at 24 fps instead of 25?

Report · May 19, 2021

I am exporting gifs from After Effects, or atleast trying to. My animation is 500 frames long and is supposed to be played at 24 FPS. When I am exporting, 24 FPS is not an option, the closest is 25.

I am not doing this in photoshop for two primary reasons: 1) It simply won't work, photoshop throws me an error every time I try exporting a gif this large. It does the same thing when I'm using 300 frames at 1080p, but works just fine with 250 frames at 1080p 2) gifs exported from after effects retain much more of the quality from my animations.

How can I choose to export an animated gif at 24 FPS in After Effects CC newest versioin?

Report · May 19, 2021

Maximum recommended frame rate for an animated GIF is probably 15 frames a second. Not 24.

The reason Photoshop throws you an error is that there's a file size limit for an animated GIF.

If you said your composition to 24 frames per second the project settings panel in the render queue will always set the frame rate to match the comp unless you override the default settings.

1920 x 1080 is a monstrously large animated GIF for any website. The file size is going to be huge and it's not going to look very good unless the viewer has a fiber optic connection to the net.

It would really help us help you if we understood what you were trying to accomplish. Without workflow and render details it is impossible to know why you're having this problem.

Report · Sep 06, 2022

It can't be done, it's a limitation of the format, not After Effects. Gifs work with centiseconds, they can only have frame durations in increments of 1/100 of a second (0.01s, 0.02s etc). This means that if your animation is 24fps (1 frame = 41.6ms) it's going to round each frame to 40ms (0.04s) which would translate to 25fps since to be able to play 24fps effectively would require frame durations to be meassured in milliseconds (41.6ms equals 0.0416s, that's too many decimals for poor old GIFs!)

So with that limitation in mind, gifs cannot play at these framerates: 6, 12, 24, 30, 60.

Only at 5, 10, 12.5, 20, 25 and 50 (the highest fps a gif can have on the web).