Export an animated GIF from a motion graphic
A GIF with one palette for the whole animation
GIF is still what plays in a chat window, a README or an email. Premation's GIF export builds one palette across the whole animation, so colours do not flicker from frame to frame. The format has limits that no tool removes: 256 colours and no sound.
Free · AGPL-3.0-only · macOS & Windows
The panel that does it
The editor’s own panel, rebuilt on its chrome. It works: drag, toggle, queue.
How to do it
- 01
Keep it short and small
A GIF stores every frame as an indexed image, so size grows fast. Export only the range you need and plan on a reduced size.
- 02
Open the Export panel and pick GIF
Window ▸ Export, Video category. GIF needs ffmpeg on your machine, as MP4, WebM and MOV do.
- 03
Set scale and frame rate
Resolution scale Half or Quarter still frames the whole composition. The frame rate defaults to the composition's; lowering it is the quickest way to shrink the file.
- 04
Queue it
Add to Queue renders in the engine and encodes in an ffmpeg child process. The export preview scrubs the real frames before anything is written.
Questions
- Can the GIF have a transparent background?
- Not from Premation. Its GIF export is opaque. For transparency on the web use WebM VP9 with alpha, or Lottie if the animation is vector.
- Why is my GIF so large?
- Every frame is stored as an image with at most 256 colours and little compression between frames. Halve the resolution scale, lower the frame rate and shorten the range. For the same clip, MP4 or WebM will be far smaller.
- Can I render a GIF from the command line?
- Yes. premation render with --format gif, or an --out path ending in .gif, writes the same file without opening the editor.