Animated GIF export render quality?

[mattchee]

For work I mostly do static graphic design for my "day job", and animate on my own for my own personal pursuits. Anyhow, I was called upon to create some very simple animated GIF banner ads. My first inclination was the use After Effects, but for time, I'm way more efficient using Moho, and there is nothing in the project that would require anything AE has the Moho doesn't. Yay Moho. But...

I'm very underwhelmed by the render quality of the GIFs that I am exporting from Moho. They are super grainy... don't look good at all. Wondering if it's something I'm doing wrong in settings, or if it's just a shortcoming of Moho.

For now, I've been using a workaround by increasing the resolution quite a bit, exporting AVI, importing those into Photoshop, scaling back down, and then exporting the GIF from Photoshop. The results are excellent, but it would save me tons of time if I could just export the correct size GIF straight from Moho.

In any case, having fun getting to use Moho for work.

[Greenlaw]

Depending on the image, GIFs can be tricky to render. It's a super old format--at maximum it supports 256 colors, and can simulate more colors only through dithering...I'm guessing that's the 'graininess' you mentioned? If so, you could try disabling dithering. This might lead to banding, however, due to the narrow GIF color range.

Moho's settings for GIF are limited. Usually, it does a reasonable job of preserving the original colors but every now and then I run into a case where it totally fails. In this case, I just render out a 24 bit PNG image sequence and use another program to create the GIF file.

The annoying part is that all the programs I've used produce different results, so you may need to try a few different programs to get what you want. Here's a few I've tried:

- TVPaint (Usually works, but can fail in some situations)
- AfterEffects with a 3rd party plugin (Same thing: usually works but can fail in some situations. But apparently in different situations.)
- Photoshop (I've gotten fairly consistent results using PS to make the GIFs. The procedure is a little clunky but it works.)

There are also a number of websites that can generate a GIF from uploaded images sequences.

For AE, I tried 2 different scripts/plugins. I can't recall which one worked best for me but I can probably look it up later.

A more modern solution is to use APNG. It's not a standard format but I think nowadays most browsers support this format. The advantage with APNG is that it supports higher color depths. Basically, it's a PNG file with GIF-like animation capabilities built in. The downside is that you'll need to find a utility that can convert images to this format. There are a couple of free ones online or downloadable but, sorry, I don't recall the names off-hand.

Hope this helps get you started.

[Greenlaw]

BTW, I seem to recall that older versions of AE could output GIF natively, but more recent versions of AE require a plugin or script.

Even in the current Photoshop, GIF export is actually a 'legacy' feature. Thank goodness they didn't remove it completely.

Oh, I should mention that I've also had to use Moho a few times to render a correct GIF from image sequences rendered from other programs like TVPaint and AE. Like I said, they all produce different results. Sigh!

[mattchee]

Thanks for the feedback! That's a lot of great information there.

I tried turning off the dithering, and it seemed to help a bit, but the results of running it through photoshop (at least in this case) were still much better, so that is what I will continue with for now.

[chucky]

APNG is great but isn't supported by many browsers yet, someone is hanging on to a patent somewhere ( or something like that) so it is not actually wildly available ( I believe- would love to be wrong).

The most important thing about rendering GIFs from Moho ( besides the render settings) is to perform a simple ctrl R render and check 'sample GIF colours' (before the gif export) … then you will get a nice GIF render.

Dithering should then be fine, just max all the settings

[Greenlaw]

The most important thing about rendering GIFs from Moho ( besides the render settings) is to perform a simple ctrl R render and check 'sample GIF colours' (before the gif export) … then you will get a nice GIF render.[/b]

Dithering should then be fine, just max all the settings

Great tip, Chucky! I'll give it a try soon. I often prepare documentation for the rigs I build at work and I like to stick animations in them. (I wish PDF was compatible with GIF but that's a whole other issue. GIF works fine in a Google Doc though.)