Alright, so the original tutorial that I made in
2019 on how to export a GIF with a transparent background from Adobe After Effects has more than
350,000 views on YouTube, so it seems like a lot of people had the same issue that I did back then.
However, many people in the comments have let me know that the solution doesn't really work
anymore, and me being a super, super nice guy and someone who literally sells GIFs for a living,
I decided to make a new and updated tutorial on how to fix that solution now in 2022.
So let's get straight to it. All right, so here we are in Adobe After
Effects and I assume you already have a composition or a video or something that you want
to export as a GIF with a transparent background. In our case, we just have this cute
little stock animation of Santa Claus taking a selfie with a selfie stick. Maybe he
needs some new sick photos for his Tinder profile, I don't know, but we're just going to use this
awesome cute stock animation for our tutorial. So, first things first, unfortunately, this
is still not possible to do directly from Adobe After Effects, not even Media Encoder
can do this, they can export GIF but not with a transparent background, so we gotta
use a bit of a workaround using Photoshop. But step number one, is you export
this composition from Adobe After Effects as a transparent video. So for settings, you make sure you select format
QuickTime, for channels super important you need to have RGB + Alpha, and for format options,
make sure you select Apple ProRes 4444. Okay, click OK and I'm just gonna export
this on my desktop and render real quick. All right, now it's time to
open this up in Adobe Photoshop. So let me just see what I can do here. I'm just gonna drag and
drop it into Photoshop here. And as you can see, we have this new panel
here on the bottom for timeline because this is literally a sequence of frames.
And now let's basically convert this .MOV file into GIF.
So to do that, you just go to File here on the top left, Export, and Save for Web or Legacy.
And this is going to load pretty pretty slow so give it some time, doesn't
matter how fast your computer is, but the GIF format, fun fact, is literally around
32 years old I believe, so the latest release was in 1989, which makes the GIF format literally
older than I am, which is crazy to think about. Anyway, so here we are and there's a couple of
settings that you need to know here, so I'm just going to walk you through all of them right now.
Super important, if file size or bandwidth or whatever is important for you this is
the approximate file size of the export. So if 6 MB is fine for you,
then that's perfectly cool. If not, you can kind of reduce that a little bit
by reducing the image size, so the resolution for example here or just as percentage.
So I'm just gonna make it 50% and again this is going to take forever to load but as you can see now it's at 3.7 MB, which is
already better, and if that's still too much then you can kind of play around with the colors.
For example, the GIF format is very limited and only allows for a maximum of 256
colors but in this case, I don't know, we only have a couple so maybe we can just
take it down to, I don't know, let's say 16. The quality might suffer a little bit but as you
can see we took that even further down to 1.8 MB. But in our case, it doesn't really matter, so
I'm just gonna go back to the full quality. All right, so super super important and actually
the main reason you're watching this tutorial, you want to make sure you have transparency
turned on, right, in which case the background is going to be transparent as you can see here.
Also, super important is you want to make sure here where it says animation, you have
it set to "Forever" so it's going to keep playing and looping forever, otherwise, if
you select it at "Once", which has happened to me multiple times by accident, it's
going to play once and that's about it. And, now this is where we get to the tricky
part, which is something called "Matte" and the description here says "Defines color
to blend transparent pixels against". So, I will also give you a couple of
examples later, I will fast forward, but just hear me out real quick.
This is basically if you know exactly how you're going to use this GIF, so for
example, if you use it against a white background on a website or banner or whatever, then you
want to make sure you select "Matte White". What this is going to do is, it's going to
optimize the edges to work super, super well and blend smoothly against the white background.
So the edges are going to be very nice, very good quality, and work well on a white background.
But if you use the same file against a black background, for example, you might
see a little bit of an edge around it. And the same is true if you want to use it against
a black background or select something else. There's also an option to select "None"
in which case it will work well against all backgrounds, this is the advantage,
but the disadvantage with Matte None, is that the edges are going to be a little
bit rough and I'm just gonna fast forward this a little bit later and show you
a couple of different renders just so you can see the difference a little bit better.
All right, so now let's go ahead and click "Save" and save this on the desktop. Again, it's
gonna take a couple of seconds regardless of how fast or slow your computer is.
All right, and now let's go to our desktop and see what happens here with this file.
So I'm just gonna right-click "Open With" and I'm just gonna open this up with Safari, but
obviously, it works the same in all browsers. And here we have it, this is how you export
a transparent GIF from Adobe After Effects. All right, so I exported a couple of different
settings just to show you how the matte works. So the first one here on the left if we zoom
in a little bit you're gonna be able to see that the edges are a little bit rough, right?
But you know, then again this is... this is a format and a compression system that's more than
30 years old, the latest release was in 1989, so honestly, I wasn't even around back
then, so I'm impressed that it can even handle this no matter how bad it looks.
But then we have the one in the middle which has a white matte, and I don't know how
well you can see on YouTube, but the edges... So this one on the right, the
edges are a little bit smoother than this one here on the left with no matte. So this works super well
against the white background. However, if we go here on the right, and we're
using the same version as here in the middle. So white matte,
white matte here on the right as well and as you can see the edges are a little bit
white when you use it against a dark background. So, that's pretty much how the matte works.
It's an unfortunate limitation of the GIF format but it's something you got to keep
in mind and navigate carefully. For most use cases, I would just
recommend you export with a white matte and that's pretty much it and try
to use it on a white background. All right, so this was the tutorial on how to
export a transparent GIF image from After Effects. I'm Eduard Stinga from
VideoPlasty.com and before you go, I just want to show you our
website VideoPlasty.com, where we have some awesome Stock
Animations, Stock GIFs and Vectors and yeah, have a look around, see
if you find anything that you like. We got a lot of super funny characters,
we got a white Santa, black Santa, tens, hundreds of characters, icons, animations, and
anything that you want. We got 3D stuff as well, stuff that you can just put together and make an
awesome little video, and yeah, we also got GIF files as well actually, so if you want to spice
up your presentations, yeah have a look, see if you like anything we got all different races
possible, black, Indian, Asian, white and so on. We've got Arab characters as well, we got icons,
everything that you want, we have it here, right? And if we don't, just send us some
suggestions and we'll see what we can do. All right, I hope you enjoyed this video,
again I'm Eduard Stinga from VideoPlasty.com. Make sure to smash the like button and leave
a comment below, let me know what you think, and yeah make sure to subscribe to my
channel for more awesome tutorials. And until next time,
stay creative!
