Transcripts
1. Exporting GIFs - For Windows and Mac OS: Hi friends. This is Sonya. I'm a motion graphics designer. I animate upbeat educational videos, climbed ads and a whole bunch of fun videos for the Web. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to get your animation social media ready in adobe after effects and Adobe Media encoder. This class will include practical skills like exporting and looped animation as a gift and a video for Windows and Mac, as well as choosing appropriate frame rates and formats. I will share my experience with limitations for file types and what to look out for on different social media sites. You will be using your own assets for this cloths. This class is perfect for animators who have their own animations ready but are looking for insights on exporting gifts with some tips and tricks for sharing them on social media. By the end of this class, you will be armed with all the knowledge you need to successfully sport and share your creation online. Ready? Let's go
2. Duration Pt1 - Framerate & Sequencing: you can set the length of your animation to any duration you want. However, there are two factors you should consider. For example, in a character animation like this, you have follow through an overlapping action. When a character is walking, child parts of their body are driven by the movement off their parent parts at an offset pace. If you notice the arm swing, the upper arm is the parent and is driving the movement. The forearm is the child. It is following that swing slightly belated, and that's the same for the hand, which is in turn, driven by the form. This is called overlapping action. If you have overlapping action, you might also have follow through, which means the child parts continue the animation. After the parent parts have finished, there's so as the upper arm is at the back of the hand is still moving from the back to the front. So something like this over here. So the character stopped walking. The arms would continue swinging a few times before coming to a stop. What this means for your animation is that your key frames are most likely sequenced. Sequenced means they do not stop and start at the same time. These are sequenced key frames. If you want your animation to loop you to find the point in your animation, where your key frames a line so that the first frame of your scene matches the last frame, this will determine the duration off your animation. You'll have an easier time aligning your key friends when you use divisions off your frame rate to sequence your key friends on DFO or the distances between the key frames. For example, in traditional hand drawn animation, the frame rate is 24 as it has ah, high device ability. Divisions off 24 would be 12 63 and so on. I tend to animate in 60 frames per second because again, it is a number that can be divided into ah, lot off smaller numbers. Andi, I find that easier. So I choose 60 frames per second
3. Duration Pt2 - Size & Platform: his second consideration should be the delivery platform. If you are planning on sharing animation online, there are some limitations for certain platforms. For example, is Ram only allows clips with a minimum length off five seconds. But because the number five gets a bit complicated to divide further down the line, I used six seconds for my loops. Thes. Two factors have led me to animate at a frame rate off 60 friends per second. I animate at full Hey HD, which is 1920 pixels with by 10 80 pixels height. This allows me to export multiple frame sizes from one animation, so I can just crop this into, let's say, a square. Anything smaller. That's full HD. If I had animated my animation at a square frame size, then I could no longer make full HD. So it's kind of thinking off, working in the biggest size possible and then being able to crop that down to whatever you want
4. GIF Format Limitations: If you're planning to export your animation as an animated GIF, you should be mindful of how maney colors and which kind of colors you're using in your animation. Animated GIF format is a bit of a volatile format. It can't read a lot of frames per second. Colors and movements, if it's overloaded, renders incorrectly and produces fuzzy colors like you can see in my walk cycle. Here, in this character, you just need to be careful not to use too many crazy colors limits how you're exporting s . We'll go through a few presets off how to export your gift.
5. Using Audio: If you want to use audio in your looped animation, you don't want to ruin it with your track. Just cutting out exposing the end of your clip. It's hard to find tracks with the perfect length, but you can just failure Aurea out at the end of your seen it. It won't be quite so jarring to make sure you don't get into trouble for using copyrighted material. You can use royalty and copyright free music from online libraries. YouTube has an audio library you can use. Choose your style, your mood, what kind of instrument you want, maybe even the length on Did you pick your track? Some tracks have conditions like giving credit to the author, which is detailed when you click on the song. Now I'll explain to you what you need to be aware off when rendering your animation. Let's hop over to media and coda
6. Creating Video Presets - Instagram: I'll go through the steps to create some render of tree sets you can have ready next time you want to render your animation for social media. Let's create a preset for Instagram first. Instagram doesn't actually support the animated GIF format, so this will be a video preset with a H 264 Kotick because we can use this format for exports other than instagram. I won't include instagram in the preset name, but instead name it. After the code IQ we are using. We can add a common that this can be used for instagram. Make sure the export video and the export audio check boxes are ticked. We want this to be our standard full Haiti preset, so we will set the frame size to 1920 by 10 80 Andi lock. It will keep all the other properties ticked. We want to ensure they are not forced to anything else but render based on the source for good quality and moderate fire size, I use 10 megabits per second target bit rate weaken set the maximum bid rate slightly higher, so the Orender has some wiggle room if necessary. On That's our first preset. It's right here. You can see the comment it says instagram, and that's all the stats for this preset
7. Changing Output Settings - Source Scaling: even though Instagram allows full Haiti up close, it's still quite common to see square posts. So let's create a preset for that too. For this, we need to adapt the source scaling because the create new Krutick preset menu doesn't give us access to the output settings. I just do it this way. I drag previously created preset onto a video in my render queue, Click the preset on Make the necessary changes. Our largest possible height is 10 80 pixel. So we will set the height to that on match the width on block the aspect ratio. Now we can adapt the source scaling on the left. We can choose how the frame will actually be cropped from the source scaling drop down menu choose scale to fill scale to fill means our video will fill the frame proportionally and crop anything that is outside of that scale. I'll save this preset has a new precent and add square to the name. I'm not sure why you can't adjust the output settings in the creed encoding presets window , but this is the way I have found it to work. So now we have two different video formats, one at full HD and one add a square crop
8. Creating GIF Presets - Twitter: Now we'll create our first gift free set. We will create a duplicate of the previous preset, as most of the settings will stay the same for the next preset. This is my basic gift, preset for animations at 60 frames per second. For platforms like Twitter, the gift format is a better choice as they play automatically and videos have to be clicked to be viewed. So we will create a gift preset for this type of platform in mind, we'll change the format to animated GIF. Export video has to be ticked. Quality is said to 100. We want to reduce the frame rate from our original to limit our exported file size. Andi. Make it easier for the gift formato handle the amount of information it has to render, since my scene is animated at 60 frames per second, I chose 20 frames per second as my export frame rate because it's a fraction off 60. I've had some weird errors with the loops before, when I didn't export at an even fraction off my original frame rate. So I have made it a habit to only reduce my frame rate for a fraction of the original. So whatever your frame rate is, just keep in mind, too. Reduce it to a fraction off that or anything close to that. This is not a hard and fast rule. It's just something that I found to work quite well for me. Sometimes I also animate in 25 frames per second, which is the standard in many companies, still, and for many online platforms For these animations, I also have a 12.5 francs per second gift preset where I basically have the same settings as for the 20 frames per 2nd 1 But it was a different frame rate, which is half off my original frame rate.
9. Creating GIFs for MAC: If you're working on Mack, you won't have the option to export a animated GIF directly from Media Encoder. But there is a work around. I'll show you create a duplicate off your hate to 64 I grabbed the square format, but it doesn't matter and rename it to gift on whatever your frame rate is you can remove. The INSTAGRAM comment will keep the frame size based on its source but forced the frame rates to a lower number. For me, that's 12 frames per second as you'll notice there's no longer an option for 20 frames per second. So that's why I'm choosing 12 frames per second for me, as the next higher number, that is, a fraction of 60 is 30 and that's not low enough for me. 12 is better, and it's still a nice even fraction of 60. Now, once you've rendered out your MP four, you can hop over to give rocket, which is a free to for Mac to convert falls to give format. The APP allows you to change additional export settings like quality and sizing. Andi. This is what you can use to create a gift on Mac. It's kind of a little bit of a work around, but it works quite well. I've done it many times. When I was still working on Mack, I will be going through a few more gift formats. So if you are working on Mack, just follow along using a duplicate off the hasty 64 or the gift 12 frames per second, which is my for Manti offerings per second might be different. Just use a duplicate off that on just the frame sizes aspect ratios on frame rates accordingly.
10. Creating GIF Presets - Pinterest & Dribbble: If you would like to upload your gifts to Pinterest, you might want to conform to their preferred aspect ratio, which is to buy three. This means our largest height is 10 80 the width needs to be 7 20 To conform to that. If you have a dribble account, you may be aware that there's a special frame size required for gifts uploaded to that platform. The largest is 800 by 600 the smallest is half of that 400 by 300. I'll duplicate the Pinterest preset. Andi unlocked the aspect ratio and said it to 800 by 600 and lock it again in order to get the source scaling correct Again, I'll now drag it onto my video in my queue. I'll access the preset on. I'll change the output settings and save it again when you saving a preset. Also, don't forget to take safe effects settings and save publish settings. I'm not sure if the effort settings are part of the publish settings, but I'm just assuming they are. And that's why I'm taking these buttons now. We'll have to just delete the 1st 1 that I saved and I have the correct one. So if I drag that onto here again, I can see that the source scaling is set to scale to fill.
11. Export & Save - Naming & Folder Structure: you can now export your animation with all of your different presets at once. I tend to choose a specific folder in my folder structure for all my final renders as an additional level off organization. I also file my video gift and still exports into separate folders. Within that, if you're creating a lot of different versions and formats of the same animation, you'll be glad to have a clean folder structure. I also have a specific file naming that you can adapt if you like. I'll just explain to you how I do it. I start my final name with the current date in reverse order. So first the year than the month and the day. That way, all of the fouls sort nicely by all this to newest. I also add a descriptive name. I mean, in this case, I just called it animation one on die. Also, add a version number, which is the one that you see. If I change something in the animation on, I want to keep both files. I can then up the version number. So B 02 or three and so on. Andi, I can know that this version is different from the version yesterday and I don't have to watch them for that. You can also have media in Kota upend the preset name that you've used to the end of your file names. So you don't have to keep up typing that. You can do that by going to edit on preferences and take upend preset name to file name and click OK.
12. Conclusion: That's the end of our class. Today he learned about the right formats and sizes to export your animation for social media. How to create including presets on what to be mindful off when creating GIFs Kong Gratz Well done on completing this class. I'm glad to have taught you something new. Choosing the right frame rates and output settings can be tricky. I'd expect you to have some unanswered questions. Feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to answer. Please leave a review with your thoughts about the class and share your project. Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for updates about upcoming classes. Thank you for taking those cloth. See you next time.
Sonja Geracsek, Motion Designer | Video Editor
