GifForge

GifForge: high-quality GIFs at the smallest file size, straight from After Effects

After Effects can't export GIFs, and the usual workarounds give you banding, dull colours or huge files. GifForge is a dockable panel that exports clean, colour-accurate GIFs in one click, sized for websites, social media, email and presentations.

Keeps every layer property

Your comp is rendered by After Effects itself, at Best quality and full resolution, before it becomes a GIF. Effects, expressions, blend modes, track mattes, 3D layers, motion blur, precomps and third-party plugins look exactly like your preview. Your project is never changed.

Best quality per kilobyte

• A custom colour palette built from your actual frames, not a generic 256-colour set
• Motion-optimised palette, plus a per-frame mode for heavy gradients
• Four dithering styles, from smoothest to smallest
• Sharp Lanczos scaling for smaller exports
• Optional extra compression with gifsicle, lossless or lossy

Hit any file size

Set a maximum size in KB and GifForge reduces colours, compression and scale automatically until the GIF fits.

Built for real workflows

• Transparent GIFs, or any solid background colour
• Work area or whole comp, any frame rate, loop forever, once or N times
• Save As dialog to name the file and choose the folder
• Live progress window showing frames rendered, time remaining and each step
• Mutes the After Effects render chime during export
• Leaves your Render Queue untouched

What you get

• GifForge.jsx, a dockable ScriptUI panel
• Setup instructions inside the file

Requirements

• Adobe After Effects 2020 or newer, Windows
• ffmpeg, free (install guide included)
• gifsicle, free and optional, for extra compression

Install in 2 minutes

1. Copy GifForge.jsx into After Effects' Scripts/ScriptUI Panels folder.
2. Restart After Effects and open Window → GifForge.jsx.
3. Turn on Preferences → Scripting & Expressions → Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network.

GifForge is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe. After Effects is a trademark of Adobe Inc.