exporting flash as animated gif

any tips?

[HelenDev]

I need to create a graphic which has to be an animated gif. I thought it might be quite nice to do a little flash movie and export it as an animated gif.

I've had a go but my first effort looks kind of fuzzy, although I tried a few different export settings.

Does anyone have any tips on this? Are there certain effects which work better than others as a gif? If anyone wants to sticky me a link to any examples where this has been achieved and looks good, I'd be interested.

Thanks.

[helpful]

could you show me the swf file and the gif file that u have exported?

[Keller]

Don't export your animation from Flash to animated gif. Flash doesn't create clean looking gif files, the lines are usually jagged and the colors dithered.
My suggestion is to first export your movie as a bitmap sequence, and then import these bitmaps into a program such as JASC Animation Shop or Adobe ImageReady, which will produce a sharp and clean animated gif.

[HelenDev]

Thanks for the replies, guys :)

To be honest I got quite disillusioned with this and have moved on to something else, but I'll bear your tips in mind should I attempt it again.

[al999]

Export your Flash movie as a sequence of bitmaps. But please bear in mind that Flash MX doesn't support this feature for movieclips. Therefore either place all animations into the main timeline or use third-party tools like FlashDigger Plus [flashdig.com] to produce bitmap sequence.
Then use any GIF animator to produce animated GIF from these bitmaps.