quality gif animation
Out of context: Reply #10
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- BaskerviIle0
Ok, I've had a play over my lunchbreak and I know how to do it now.
Basically if you were to take a piece of footage from after effects and export as an animated gif you will get a pretty nasty quality and large file size.
Photoshop is the key, but not simply importing a .mov into PS.The way animated gifs work is as a series of individual gifs played in sequence. Like a movie file, the less colours and movement, the smaller the file size.
If you notice in the gif below, for most of the animation the the gif is static. That is, the area in the image around the movement (the table and chairs, the street etc) is completely static, this means there is no change in pixels from frame to frame which means less colour/data, which means smaller file size.
The way to do it, is to make sure the movement in your animation is restricted to a small area, then mask off the rest of the image. So just take one frame and use that to mask the rest of the animation. In PS all you need to do is import a .mov then create a new layer and make your static mask on that layer.
Then obviously when you export you need to tweak the settings, be selective about reducing the colour palette of the gif etc.
I made this gif of 'here's johnny' by importing as a .mov to PS, then masking the wood of the door so that it never moves from frame to frame (in the original shot the camera is moving slightly), the filesize is 737kb, comparable to the filesize on frommetoyou tumblr
obviously the less actual movement you have the smaller the filesize (this is where big pauses will keep your filesize down).
the reason the gifs on this site look so good is because they're shot well, and masked well:
http://fromme-toyou.tumblr.com/t…the filesize is small because they're all 70% static images.