How To Publish an Animated GIF from Flash

Flash animations are the best ways to entertain and inform the audience in terms of any subject. However, the problem is that it is not always accessible to people who do not have Flash plug-in or in places where it is impossible to upload the Flash SWF. Good thing is that with an animated GIF, you can make your own Flash animations easily accessible to everyone. Plus, publishing it from Flash is just easy. Check out how you can do this yourself:

* Navigate to Publish Settings in the Flash program. Go on File and then click on "Publish Settings". A window will appear for you where you need to start changing settings for the GIF for publishing. Once the window is open, go to Formats and then check on GIF Image. Then, click the tab indicating GIF at the top corner of "Publish Settings" window.
* Choose the right size for your animated GIF. In the GIF tab, you will notice that "Match Movie" is checked. Do not change this if you prefer to publish the image in the same size of the Flash movie. Otherwise, change the size and enter the pixel height and width that you prefer. Avoid distorting the image by taking note of the ration of the size of the original movie.
* Establish the animation playback of the GIF. Choose "Animated", which you can see in the "Playback" options. This will set the movie to publish in a frame by frame setting as a GIF animation.
* Enter the playback options of your animated GIF. Choose "Loop Continuously" to make the animated GIF playing indefinitely when published. However, you can also set it to repeat by indicating how many times you want the animated GIF to play.
* Set other options for your animated GIF publication. Optimize the color of the GIF to remove unused colors so that the image size will be reduced. Set "Dither Solids" so that the colors will be mixed in the current existing palette. Other options you have to set up are Interlace, Smooth, and Remove Gradients. Set all of them very well so that your animated GIF will be published at its best quality.
* Set the transparency options for the GIF. The "Transparency" menu will offer you various options to apply on your animated GIF. Choose "Transparent" if you prefer the background to be transparent. Choose "Opaque" if you wish the background to be a fully solid color. Lastly, choose "Alpha" to set the opacity of the GIF from a range of zero to 255.
* Choose the correct palette type to display the image. Set the GIF image to Web 216 so that the image will use standard colors to work for all web browsers. Pick "Adaptive" so the program will build a new color palette that is based on the components of the image. Then, choose "Web Snap Adaptive" to let the program change the colors as close to the 216 palette as possible. The last one is "Custom" where you can create your own color palette.
* Publish the animated GIF once everything is set. Publish the image by simply saving the settings you have changed. Then, go to File and click on "Publish". An easier way to do this is to use "Publish Settings" window. Click the "Publish" icon from the window and your animated GIF is all set and good to go.


The process of publishing animated GIF from Flash is easy. From now on, you can distribute Flash animations to a larger population the easier way.