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gif transparency and other cartoon animation problems
Hello ~
My client wants to import GIF with transparency into AE to work over a background. As reported in so many other postings in this group over the years, once imported into AE, the transparent area becomes white or some other background color. I am looking for a solution to this problem.
in one of the posts I saw, the solution was to employ the “T” button to preserve transparency, but I haven’t figured out how that works.
Another proposed solution is to bring the GIFS into photoshop and convert them to PSD layers, and I successfully imported them as PSD layers and got the foreground transparency. However, a big problem with that is that the character layer, once brought into AE, doesn’t remain anchored at the bottom of the frame as it should, and starts floating around in the frame arbitrarily. So registration is lost and the conversion accomplished nothing.
This is frustrating and I thought someone might have a solution. What I have heard is that GIF is the industry standard for doing cell-type animation, so is AE the wrong program for this work??
You could help me if you could tell me a) how to preserve transparency in a GIF B) How to get a transparent import in a PSD file to maintain it’s position in the frame, and C) it would also help if there was a way to import a merged PSD and split it into layers once it is in AE. Stranegly, you can do that in Final Cut and you can even split up a PSD in Livemotion, but AE seems unable to do this.
help!
John
“Life is good, as long as it doesn’t take up too much of my time.”
-anonymous gamer
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3 Replies
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Alright thanks. I’ll try to grab the image sequence and move it altogether, although I am unacquainted with how to do that.
John
“Life is good, as long as it doesn’t take up too much of my time.”
-anonymous gamer
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Sorry Dave, that link didn’t lead anywhere. Syntax issue?
I appreciate your detailed response.
My client has responded with this:
“We have found some success by taking gif images, loading them into Adobe Photoshop, turning them into RGB (and not indexed) and then saving them with the extension .psd
It seems that AfterEffects _will_ take gifs with transparency provided you turn them into an Adobe-like product. AfterEffects does not allow transparency with any images which end with the .gif extension. We suspect that this might be a deliberate corporate decision.”
-John
“Life is good, as long as it doesn’t take up too much of my time.”
-anonymous gamer
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Thanks, Dave. I think your advice is right on target.
~ J
“Life is good, as long as it doesn’t take up too much of my time.”
-anonymous gamer
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