Animated Gifs: Still Not Extinct
Who uses animated gifs anymore? Seriously? With flash finally being widely accepted in all sorts of media, what purpose does the old dinosaur that is the animated gif serve these days? To be honest, there’s not much use for them anymore. However, there are still instances to this day that I must resort the “old ways” in order to make a client happy.
One such instance is the “Broadcast email”. Most people in this industry are familliar with services like “Campaign Monitor” and “Constant Contact”. These are services that will parse your html written code into beautifully rendered emails and then blast them to a defined client list. These services are great because you can use html and static images to portray your ad to the world.
Recently I had a client ask for a broadcast email with FLASH in it. Not linking to it, but actually IN the email. Unfortunately this is still not widely supported (if at all) especially with Microsoft Outlook. Like many emails out there, I suggested making a broadcast email with a link to the animation, but that wouldn’t cut it with the client.
That’s when I brought up the Idea of using an animated gif in the email to represent the animation they crave. Their first thoughts were “Eeewww. Why would you do such a thing” because their first thoughts of an animated gif were the following:
Sure when animated gifs were made painstakingly frame by frame in fireworks, this is the garbage that gets kicked out. As repugnant as they are, I assured them the animated gif I was refering to was more of a professional animation, but just in that file format and they hesitantly agreed.
“So Dave, how do I make professional looking animated gifs that can still bring impact to my design?” you may ask. Here’s how!
Step 1 - Build the animation in FLASH just like you would any other Flash (swf)
Once your done making your animation don’t go the fools way and export the Gif from flash. To this day Flash still does a cruddy job at exporting Gifs. I’m talking UGLY!!! Instead goto File — Export — Movie and under file type, save as AVI .
After you hit OK, then the compression dialogue comes up. For the best quality change your compression to Full Frames (Uncompressed) as shown below and hit OK.
Step 2 - Import AVI into Photoshop
Photoshop can work wonders when it comes to exporting animated gifs, so why not use it? Open Photoshop and goto File — Import — Video Frames to Layers. (Note you may need to install the latest version of Quicktime to use this feature.) Select your newly created AVI using the options below.
Once imported you will see something new in your Photoshop screen…. the Animation panel (as shown below). On the bottom-left portion of the panel you will see your animation controls. Including play, rewind etc. Next to that you will most likely see the words “Forever” this means your animation will repeat it’s cycle over and over agian. If that’s your style, then keep it as it is. I prefer my animations to only play once, so I click onthe word “Forever” and it brings up the option for “Once”.
After everything checks out goto File — Save for Web and Devices to pull up the export dialogue. To properly export the animated gif you need to (1) make sure your format is Gif and (2) make sure the animation controls show up on the bottom right (as shown). For the best quality I use 256 colors, with a selective color table and diffusion dithering at 100%. It’s never JPG quality but it gets darn close if you use the setting I’m showing below.
This would be a good time to note that a 600px wide animated gif can be HUGE. If your using these for a broadcast email like me, host the file on your webserver and have the html template pull the image from there. It makes for a cleaner email.
When it’s all said and done Photoshop will crunch out a genuine animated GIF at the best possible quality. 100 times better than what Flash alone will give you. Below is a sample of what can be done with a little work around like the steps above. As you can see Animated Gifs are still not extinct.
