Creating animated GIFs

[itai_ben_h]

Hello everyone,

Using Photoshop CC 2019 & Premiere pro CC 2019, I wish to create an animated, fast-moving GIF (such as the video below) to be embedded in emails and websites, and am experiencing a few technical problems with each app, and was wandering if there's something I'm not seeing, for creating GIFs shouldn't be a complicated task.

Since my purpose is to create smoothly-rotating graphics, I cannot do it it in PS, because it'll require hundreds of frames and painstaking work, and will ultimately move very slow (and making it move faster by Convert to Video Timeline>Set Timeline Frame-Rate yields a fragmented result);

And so, I moved to do it with Premiere, and the visual result was excellent, but there I experience two problems:

First, the exported GIF always ends up weighing too much, somewhere around 5 MB, too much for websites.

And secondly, the perfect-white background in the workfile (#ffffff) turns, after being exported, into a slight gray (#fbfbfb) and I really want to avoid it.

So, I was wandering if there's maybe another app which is recommended for creating animated GIFs that someone here may be familiar with.

Thank you very much,

Itai

[rodneyb56060189]

since you're gonna be putting the gif into a table/cell structure of website or layer or whatever ( it's been years since I did website stuff), maybe export the gif as 240 instead of 480.  See if it fits your page OK. What you did looks nice and smooth and well done.

as far as color goes ( white background) I have no clue what you did and why that is happening.  Maybe just make sure all your entire gif images have that white background (maybe make it black and white mode or something instead of RGB ? ) I have no clue.

good luck

[Kevin-Monahan]

Itai_ben_h,

From what I recall, the way to solve the file size issue is to do this work in Photoshop. Sorry about that.

As far as the grayish whites go, it's likely related to the codec and/or color space you're working in. Try changing sequence settings > previews to ProRes, then render that out in the ProRes codec in your timeline. Then, export as ProRes (checking Using Previews). I think you should see the whites correctly then.

If that doesn't work, try importing the project into After Effects and output to ProRes. If that still isn't working, it may be Player related (some setting in VLC or QuckTime), if that's where you are evaluating gray.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Warren Heaton]

AME's animated GIF option, unfortunately, does not provide the options one wants to have available in order to optimize an animated GIF.  It also has an issue with not keeping white when reducing the color depth from 24-bit to 8-bit.

Instead of using Adobe Media Encoder to create your animated GIF, use Photoshop's Save for Web (Legacy).

1. Export your animation from Premiere Pro as a movie file using either of the following:
   1. as QuickTime using Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) or
   2. as H264 using Match Source High Bitrate
2. Open the resulting movie file in Photoshop.
3. Choose File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy).
4. In the Save for Web (Legacy) dialog box, you'll have all of the options you'd want for optimizing your animated GIF and getting it to a suitable file size.

The primary things you have to play with to get the file size smaller is frame size (smaller width and height = smaller GIF), duration (shorter duration = smaller GIF) and color depth (fewer colors - smaller GIF).  From your sample, you can probably use as few as 64 colors, maybe less.  You'll be able to preview what it looks like prior to clicking Save.  You will also get a file size estimate from PS in the lower left corner.