I’ve been wanting to create an interactive infographic for awhile, but wasn’t sure where to start. Then it came to me: what if I used Rise 360 and integrated some Storyline blocks? And that’s how th...
Published 7 years ago
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Hi Camilla,
I made the animations for Allison in a program called After Effects. There are lots of ways to animate the different things like the planets or the spaceship. Animating in After Effects is a lot more "from scratch" than in something like power point or Storyline, but it's really fun to learn (for me at least haha).
After animating in After Effects I use adobe media encoder to render my animations to .mp4 videos. Then I used Photoshop to convert those mp4 files to gifs. You can also use online gif makers to convert just about any mp4 file (or a part of that video file) to a gif!
Hope this is helpful!
I made the animations for Allison in a program called After Effects. There are lots of ways to animate the different things like the planets or the spaceship. Animating in After Effects is a lot more "from scratch" than in something like power point or Storyline, but it's really fun to learn (for me at least haha).
After animating in After Effects I use adobe media encoder to render my animations to .mp4 videos. Then I used Photoshop to convert those mp4 files to gifs. You can also use online gif makers to convert just about any mp4 file (or a part of that video file) to a gif!
Hope this is helpful!
Hi Laura,
I've built my animation in storyline and used screen to GIF to create the GIF. When uploaded in to rise it's very pixelated. I re captured it on a wider screen setting but it didn't fix the issue. Any tips you have would be great. Here's the very bare rise file and its' the 'beach' section. https://rise.articulate.com/share/qULK-ly3xXsrjepjOQMv9-mAWEnQX0eB
Any assistance would be great. I can also send the articulate file if needs be.
TIA
Emma
I've built my animation in storyline and used screen to GIF to create the GIF. When uploaded in to rise it's very pixelated. I re captured it on a wider screen setting but it didn't fix the issue. Any tips you have would be great. Here's the very bare rise file and its' the 'beach' section. https://rise.articulate.com/share/qULK-ly3xXsrjepjOQMv9-mAWEnQX0eB
Any assistance would be great. I can also send the articulate file if needs be.
TIA
Emma
- Hi Emma, sorry to jump in. Having looked at your animation I thought it looked pretty good and I thought initially it was an intentional style choice. I think what you are referring to as 'pixelated' is actually 'colour banding' and is quite common with the GIF format. The GIF being an older format has inherent limitations. For example it can only support 256 colours and uses various (compression) methods to compose the image you see on the screen. I have never used 'Screen to Gif' so I am unsure what compression methods they use for their GIF output. But in Photoshop for example you can do things such as reduce amount of colours or apply 'Dither' (a way to make colour banding look smoother). My guess with your image is that the 'screen to Gif' software does not apply Dither which is causing the colour banding. I could be wrong but that's my best guess. I would suggest using a different tool to create the gif. Using storyline to create the animated GIF is probably not the best idea, but if you are limited by software a work around might be to record short screencast of the animation cropping out any background (maybe you can use articulate Peek?) then you are free to use other GIF generator tools on the web (https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker).
I apologise if you know all this stuff already!
Andy
p.s. I'm English, hense the spelling of colour and apologise ;-) - Hey Emma!
Okay, here's what I'd recommend to try.
In your Storyline project where you created the animation follow these steps.
Home Tab > Publish > Video tab in the Publish window.
Tell it where you want to save your video.
Now open Photoshop.
File > Import > Video Frames to Layers
Navigate to the video you saved and choose it.
You'll get a little dialog, then that says what range you want and all that, you can adjust that if needed especially if your animation is long then you can check the "Limit to Every 2 frames" box
Click OK
Now your video is going to come into Photoshop where each frame is a layer.
Got to File>Export>Save for Web (Legacy)
Now you're in the GIF export dialog.
Play around with these settings, especially the dither and the colors. Making a Gif from scratch like this is a balancing act of getting the file size small enough that it loads easily but keeping your quality as high as possible. If you know you made your video a little bigger and you're planning for things to be scaled down in their final use, try scaling it down in the image size section of this dialog and it will drastically reduce your file size.
I know this is a little complicated but feel free to reach back out if you're having trouble!
Glad you're experimenting using Gifs in your courses, I think they really add something special!
Cheers!
-Laura
