An animated GIF file is a sequence of GIF images that plays as a movie. This format is commonly used for small, short, simple movies that play in web browsers.

To play an animated GIF file, the web browser first loads the entire file into memory and then plays it from memory (not from disk). To prevent excessive delays before playback begins, and to avoid using too much memory, an animated GIF should have a short duration and a low frame rate. Frame rates of 5 frames per second (or less) are recommended, unless the duration is very short (1 second or so).

When you render a movie to the animated GIF format, colors are dithered to an 8-bit palette (256 colors). Before rendering your final movie, render a test composition so that you can adjust colors if the results are not what you expect. You can create a color palette in Adobe Photoshop if the default Web Safe or System color palettes don’t give the results that you want.

A pixel in an animated GIF file is either completely opaque or completely transparent. When rendering an animated GIF movie, After Effects must convert the finely-graded alpha channel of the composition to this much simpler type of transparency. The transition between transparent and opaque areas is abrupt, and may not be desired for more subtle visual elements.

You render and export a movie as an animated GIF file using the render queue. Animated GIF is one of the formats available in the Format menu in the Output Module Settings dialog box.