Animated GIF export does not work, ¿any hint?

[jjgarcia74]

I have this stupid animation

  Dropbox - netutron_Flash.fla

I am happy with it because it is the first one I made, and I wanted to export it to GIF format so that I can embed it in a Powerpoint. The problem is that the Export Animated GIF option does not produce anything but the first frame. The blinking eyes and other steps that do show in the HTML Canvas or Flash formats, are absent. I have tried changing all parameters (I started with stock options) but none seem to work.

[rezun8]

If I recall correctly the animated gif option will export only whats shown on stage and not any MC's witha nested animation. You will have to put all movement on main timeline if you have to have this format output.

[jjgarcia74]

Is there an "easy" way to flatten an already existing animation to achieve this workaround?

[Petr_Tarasov]

If save all frames manualy and then create GIF with sequnce of pictures (via Photoshop for ex),It can be done.

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

You can select the eyes movieclips and in Properties set them to be Graphic. Do the same for the top level movieclip, make it a Graphic too. Once those are done the export Animated GIF will work.

You will get a 500k file that way, so then take your exported gif to this web page:

https://ezgif.com/optimize

Here's your animation ready to optimize:

https://ezgif.com/optimize/ezgif-3-6607a8a115.gif

The compressed version will come down to about 18k.

[jjgarcia74]

I have found an even simpler method:

1. Export Video

2. Within the panel, select "generate alpha channel" and "Convert video in Adobe Media Encoder"

3. Choose a folder for the movie and click OK

4. When Adobe Media Encoder pops up, change the image format from H264 to "Animated GIF"

5. Optionally use some software to optimize the resulting GIF. I use Imagemagick with the command "convert original.gif -layers Optimize final.gif"

[Colin Holgate]

What settings do you use in the animated gif preset? The MOV that the export video gives you includes an 8 bit alpha channel, which GIF wouldn't be able to use. Do you have the option to keep some of the transparency?

[jjgarcia74]

Actually you are right, the Animated GIF loses the alpha channel! It seems the right sequence would be to either forego the alpha channel or to use PNG sequence as in-between method -- for some reason my copy of Adobe Animate does not offer directly, I have to go through:

1. Export Video

2. Within the panel, select "generate alpha channel" and "Convert video in Adobe Media Encoder"

3. Choose a folder for the movie and click OK

4. When Adobe Media Encoder pops up, change the image format from H264 to "PNG Sequence with Alpha channel"

5. Compose all PNG using Imagemagick "convert *.png -layers Optimize final.gif"

Quite inconvenient...

[Colin Holgate]

The way that the export to video works is very clever. It publishes a SWF and then frame by frame records what should have appeared by that time. That can include a mixture of movieclip or graphic animation, and also any code driven animation. With Flash 8 the export worked in a similar way, but couldn't do code driven animation. With Flash 9 it could do code driven animation, but only what could be achieved in real time, more than likely frames would be too long, or would be skipped. It was rarely of much use.

Once they got the current export video working it was amazin, you could create something that was impossibly complex, that could never play even on the fastest computer on earth. But the export video would be perfect frame rate.

It would be a reasonable request to decouple the video part from the rest of the process. Like you would select export movie, then choose whether that is swf, image sequence, etc, the same could work with export video. You would choose whether that export left you would MOV, GIF, PNG sequence, etc. The thing they would have in common is that code driven animation, and movieclip animation, would show up in the output files.

I think I'll request that.

[jjgarcia74]

Thanks for the clarifications. And just for the record, this is the final command line I had to use to recompose the *.png into a suitable gif

magick *.png -dither none -layers CompareAny -layers Optimize -matte -depth 8 -layers RemoveDups output.gif

Using the latest version of ImageMagick on windows and a target palette of 8 bits gives me a 19k gif, enough for using it in various powerpoints 🙂

[Colin Holgate]

I'm not as fond of the command line as you are. I use a TinyPNG plugin in Photoshop, and I have other image compression tools that have a friendly UI I can understand. Behind the scenes they are just doing the command line you're showing, but I'm happy to pay my shareware fee to make my life easier.

[kalim22625299]

I, too, was unable to export from Psd as a GIF. I'm on OS High Sierra 10.13.3 with the most recent Adobe cc 2019.

What works for me is "Save for Web (Legacy)..." and selecting a GIF option from there.

[kristi annj]

THIS!!  Thank you!

[muhammettahasari]

In Adobe animate, I will tell you the tricks of registering as gif. I will talk about the recommendations of the Adobe site and the better solutions I have found. If you do not want to watch the entire video, please contact me after 22 minutes.

In a nutshell the best solution is to record the screenshot as a video. Then, to convert it to gif file from the site I gave. Watch the video to see all the methods.  

I m using that in this job;

1-Adobe Animate

2-Camitasia Studio

3-https://ezgif.com/video-to-gif

youtube.com/watch?v=PUhK60Ijvgk