It seems the age of the animated GIF is upon us. The technology behind the animated GIF has really been around forever. It’s quite a simple thing really. But on the entertainment side of things, we’ve seen the rise of sites like Giphy (a library of animated gifs), Imgur has their own GIF maker, and there are services that will easily turn YouTube clips into animated GIFs as well.

They are easily integrated and embedded in Facebook posts and blogs and websites. So, they are constantly gaining in popularity.

But, perhaps a more interesting development is the rise of the animated GIF for motion designers. Sites like Dribbble, that focus on sharing small bits of content from designers have made animated GIFs a common thing to see. Behance too allows designers to upload animated GIFs.

But, even though these GIF’s are so popular and important for many designers to be able to share their work, there hasn’t been an easy way to create them. Commonly, an artist will have to render out an image sequence from After Effects, then load those images into Photoshop, crop them, and save an animated GIF.

There are many other ways to achieve this, including online tools, but nothing perhaps as simple for an After Effects user than the newly released GifGun plug-in for After Effects.

GifGun has a very simple idea really, make animated GIF creation super simple right out of After Effects.

Let’s take a look at how it works and if it delivers on its promise of easy animated GIF-making.

Before You Start

GifGun, downloads as a single .zip with MAC and Windows versions. On the MAC, users can simply click the installer to set up the plug-in. On Windows, users need to first move the files to the proper AE subfolder before installing.

Additionally, on either OS, it’s important to first open After Effects and within the general preferences, turn on “Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network” if not already checked.

That’s about it for setup. Once you have the script installed, you can reopen AE, click on the Window tab and open the script.

It should also be noted that the GifGun team built the plug-in with compatibility for After Effects CC 2015, CC 2014, and CC. The makers claim that it also works with CS6 and CS5, but that they didn’t do much testing on those platforms.

Note as well that older versions of After Effects have a GIF-making tool, but it’s been removed from new versions, so GifGun is for those with more up to date versions of AE.

The Interface

The GifGun interface is quite simple. For the first release, the team said they wanted to make it easy and intuitive. That it is. There is basically one button that says “Make Gif”. Push that button and your comp will render a gif around your in and out points.

You do have a few control options as well. You can set up a folder for your GIF’s to render to. You can set the GIF width, and the height will adjust to match. You can set frame rate, and also save a video file.

That’s really all there is to it. This does mean, that there are some limitations of course. There is only one compression algorithm right now. According to comments on the AE Scripts page for the product, they are already working on incorporating other compression algorithms and adding more control panel options.

Check out the result that GifGun put out from our project above.

Pricing

The GifGun plug-in is built around convenience. It doesn’t do anything that you can’t already do with a combination of other tools. But if you make a lot of animated GIFs, it can certainly save you some time.

It’s priced at $19.99 right now. So, if your time is worth 20 bucks, give it a shot.

Also, note that you can download a free trial to test it out. You will be limited to only 350 px wide GIF’s though with the trial.

For more information on GifGun, visit gifgun.cc .

Are you using GifGun, or do you make animated GIF’s another way? Tell us how in the comments below.