Adobe Premiere Pro - Advanced Training

How to export small animated Gif in premiere pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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Welcome everybody, to this Black Friday sale extravaganza, communicated to you via a jumpy animated GIF, let me show you how to make it in Premiere Pro. All right, so this is what we're going to export, it's going to go out to an emailer, and you've got to be prepared, that it's going to look nothing like that, or at least not as good quality. GIFs are a format that died and came back, and they have quite limitations, so let's explore them. 

If you want to follow along with this particular exercise, you will find, in your 'Social' folder, in your 'Exercise Files', one called 'Fireworks', drag that on, and in your 'Essential Graphics', go to 'Browse'. I typed in 'free sale', grab that one, change the color of the font, waited for the fonts to load, you can do anything you like. 

So now we want to export it, so with our sequence selected, 'Command M', 'Ctrl M' on a PC, and at the top here where it says Format, pick 'Animated GIF', not that hard. There's no presets, that's the default one. We're going to get it to go to a certain place, I've got, on my Desktop, which I've totally made really messy, I mean, I feel bad about this, I'm going to-- I've made a folder called Fireworks, I'm going to clean that up as soon as this course is finished. It's messy, with my Feng Shui, let's hit 'Save'. 

So what you want to do is, you've only got to play around with video, and you've got these kind of few settings here for a GIF. The things that are most important are the size here and the frame rate, they'll determine what size it is, but also the file size. File size is super important for GIFs, especially this one, it's going out via an emailer, and lots of emails have restrictions, on how big the total size can be, like 10 Megabytes is pretty common, so we need to get it under there. 

So what we're going to do first up is, I'm going to change the size, my particular emailer is going to go out at about 500 pixels, 540 is pretty common for an emailer, that's going to present nicely on lots of different email systems, like Gmail and Outlook, anyway, already we're seeing the quality, kind of come down, it's unfit, so let's go to 100%. 

So we're not looking at it too badly, ah, so bad. GIF format, the reason it looks bad is, because GIFs are only allowed to, you know, they only have 256 colors to play around with, whereas this had millions to start with, it's now trying to do the same thing with 256. So if you really want the quality to be better, what you really need to do is not pick fireworks in the background, that has lots-- that's using all the colors, all the sparkles in the background, so pick something really plain. The nicest animated GIFs are often ones that I, just have a couple of simple bold colors, not fireworks, but hey, we want a sale, and nothing says sale, like fireworks, for some reason, anyway. 

So we've got our size down to what we need for our emailer, now the Frame Rate is the next part, so 25 frames/second is too much for a GIF, it ends up making the file sizes really big, and we need this to slip under the radar for an emailer. Let's start at 25, and we're going to start queuing it up. In Media Encoder, these are one of the joys of using Media Encoder, we can start, because everyone's is going to be different, there's no like, you have to use 10 frames/second, or this size. 

What you need to do for your particular case is, go 'Duplicate', I'm going to have three duplicates of that same one. So I'm going to say, this first one's at 25, this one, I'm going to click 'Custom', and I'm going to say, what does it look like, at 10. Click 'OK', 10 is my default, I use 10 all the time. If you need the long story cut short, just use 10, but it's not an absolute rule, but let's see what it looks like at 5. 

So I've got these three different options, I'm going to hit 'Play', get them all going. All right, it's going to chug through those, let's have a little look at what appears on this other one. There's my folder, so the first one, 25 frames/second, 9.4 Megabytes, just squeezing in the 10 Megabytes. This one here, about 10 frames, and this one here at 5, you can see, quite a substantial file size change, let's have a look. Look at that, basically, like video, except poor colors, looks all right, looks way better than it did inside of Media Encoder. Don't use Media Encoder's preview as a really good gauge of what things are going to look like, remember, in here if we go to Custom, this thing over here is not a great visual. So if you're dragging the quality up and down, it's not changing over here, don't use this, actually, get it done, and get it exported to see what it actually renders like, so, great. 

That's, can you see, do you get the feeling? This feels more animated GIFfy, that's kind of part of the, part of the charm of an animated GIF, is it's like stunted jitteriness. Can you live with 5 frames/second, you might have to, you might need, like 10 of these little animated GIFs in your emailer. Now quality, you can mess around with, the same thing, duplicate it a few times, and let's say that, actually-- I'm going to, remember, 10 was my favorite, or 10 is my favorite now, and you can then say this one plus another couple, and play around with the quality slider, and it will do nothing. I don't know why the quality slider is in there, it's only got 256 colors. I'm not sure what this does, really, my animated GIF knowledge is, not an expert animated GIFfer, but I make a lot of them, I should know more, but you can play around with the quality, and you'll notice, I'm kind of just picking three different sizes, let's go, and let's have a look. 

You shouldn't be able to tell the difference in, maybe it's a bug with my one, come on, Media Encoder, you can do it; stuck. There you go, it's back working again, that was weird. So you can see, they're all the same file size, doesn't matter how quality it is, and they all look the same. Yours might be different, mine never, there you go. If you need the file size to be a teeny tiny bit smaller, you can play around with the size, and, so the physical size, 500. Nobody's going to notice the difference in 40 pixels, obviously, depending on where this is going, but an email, they won't. Quality, 100, because it makes no difference, and over here, the frame rate, you might go, oh, there we go, maybe just a teeny tiny, maybe 10, and eke out some of the file sizes, let's have a look. This last one, is a teeny tiny bit smaller, and probably nobody's going to notice much, in this particular use case, that it is 40 pixels smaller. 

All right, happy animated GIFfing, remember, if you want it to look even better, is to make sure that you use as limited color palette as possible, because remember, we've only got 256 of them, you don't want to waste them on frivolous fireworks. All right, that is going to be it, and in a strange coincidence, it's actually Black Friday, it's not Black Friday, it's just Friday, it's Friday afternoon, I'm finished videoing for the week, going to take the weekend off, I will see you probably in a video in about, I don't know, five seconds, but for me it's going to be a whole Saturday and Sunday off, and I will see you on Monday, or in five seconds, it's the same thing.