To follow-up on our article 15 great animated gifs on Dribbble, it makes sense that we look at how we can make such gifs as swiftly as possible. We will go over this in two separate articles. We’ll first see in this article how to quickly turn a rendered video file into a gif without having to use Photoshop. In the second part we’ll use some ExtendScript to speed-up the process of rendering in After Effects and opening the video file in Photoshop.

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Dribbble is a really great place to get exposure as a designer. It’s also a really good place to showcase your animation and motion graphics skills. Here’s some great examples of how a simple looping gif can quickly demonstrate the feeling of an animation.

Palisade Animation by J.R. Schmidt

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You will often find yourself toggling the visibility of layers in After Effects. This can get really cumbersome and hazardous to click all those little eye icons in deeply nested compositions. Having a controller layer on top of everything with some checkbox expressions can really help organizing everything out.

Select the layer you’d want to toggle and add this expression in its opacity property.

(comp("the-comp-name").layer("the-layer-name").effect("the-checkbox-effect")("Checkbox") == 1 ? value : 0)

This layer will then show when the checkbox is checked. To invert the effect, just invert the value and the 0.

Heads up!

Most layers, when hidden, will not add time to renders and RAM Previews although sometimes, mostly when the hidden layer has expressions, it will still be processed when rendering.

Adobe provides us some command line interface to start renders without having to start After Effects (here’s the documentation). This can be really useful when using multiple computers on remote desktops or just to give you the ability to alt+tab, start your render and keep on working. It offers a lot of options and possibilities. We won’t go over all of them, but we’ll instead focus on creating bash aliases to execute what we would probably mostly want. Don’t worry if you’ve never used the command line, we’ll go over all there is to know.

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Sometimes, all you need is a constraint. The fear of the blank page can stop you really fast from starting something. Here are some challenges and contests you can do now to help you get creative without the hassle of thinking what to be creative about.

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Modifying shortcuts in After Effects is a surprisingly tedious and unintuitive task. There is no way to do it from within our interface as in Premiere Pro (Premiere Pro > Keyboard Shortcuts) or Cinema 4D (Window/Layout > Command Manager).

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From After Effects animation techniques to pre-production workflow tips passing by ExtendScript automation and useful apps and websites, we’ll cover a large palette of motion graphics/animation/video, related topics.

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