Creating Animated Gifs in Illustrator?

[karenf1]

In PS if you have a layered file, you can create an animated gif via SAVE FOR WEB AND DEVICES.

But it seems you can only create static gifs via SAVE FOR WEB AND DEVICES in Illustrator from layered files.

Please! Say that ain't so - that I'm missing some small detail that will allow me to do this same thing from Illustrator!!!!

Many thanks in advance!

[_scott__]

It is so.

You can export layers to Photoshop and save the gif there (or Fireworks).

You can export layers to an animated SWF.

Illustrator just doesn't have any core animation capabilities. Any animtion from illustrator is in exported SWF format and even that isn't thorough.

[karenf1]

Thanks so much Scott,

You break my heart! ;(

Going via PS is tons of extra work. Uneccessary work! What happens is that for some strange reason, the layers come into PS weird. the icon for EACH layer is a folder AND a subfolder. So they have be flattened one by one and THEN turned into frames in the animation layer AND THEN saved as a gif. So what's perplexing me - is seeing the same SAVE FOR WEB AND DEVICE dialog box in Illustratore - yet it only saves static gifs.

Is it really true that i have to go through all these extra steps? Yikes! I wonder why Adobe would do that, and yet go through all the trouble to let you export swf's. It seems so very poorly planned by Adobe that i keep hoping someone will tell me I'm missing something - and that there's a way to do this from Illustrator.

But thank you so much for your help. I really do appreciate it.

[Mylenium]

You're not missing anything. That's just the way it is. The rest would be a waste of time - I'm sure we al lhave better things to do than discuss why Adobe does some things and not others and how inconsistent their applications are....

Mylenium

[_scott__]

karenf1 wrote:

So what's perplexing me - is seeing the same SAVE FOR WEB AND DEVICE dialog box in Illustratore - yet it only saves static gifs.

I'm not certain why that's perplexing... Photoshop's Save for Web dialog has no options to allow you to create animation. All the animation settings are in Photoshop itself in the Animation Panel. No animation is done in the Save for Web dialog. And there is no Animation Panel in Illustrator.

[karenf1]

Thanks Scott,

You are correct. And I stand corrected. My confusion was caused by so many hours spent banging my head against the creative suite, trying to figure out a solution, with the Adobe Help instructions, so... Un Helpful - that I remembered incorrectly, which method of my many attempts finally produced an animated gif. BTW, a friend sent this link: http://picasion.com. it's an online animated gif maker. Sort of like the online favicon maker. STill, it's shocking to me that Adobe makes it so hard, but I've posted a request in the new features forum.

Again - thanks!

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

You would do much better with, Fireworks, Flash of After Effects if you need to save as an animated gif.