If you could build an animation in Tumult Hype, and then export it to animated GIF & video, how would that change how you create?

We’re extremely excited to release new export options in Tumult Hype 2.5: you can now create smooth 30fps animated gifs and high resolution MP4 videos from your animations. We’re particularly excited about enabling animated GIF creators. Born in 1987, the GIF remains the standard (and only) animated image file format. If you’re interested in its history, watch Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium.

At its core, the GIF is a package for narrative —  a sequence of images that tell a story:

Our initial tests in GIF exporting were exciting, but were mostly floating blue boxes and sample text. We loved seeing GIFs created by our beta testers with more imagination:

Here is the same animation in HTML form.

As you can tell, we’re really excited about this new option, because it hugely increases the number of platforms to share Tumult Hype animations. We can’t wait to see more Tumult Hype animations in emails, Tumblr, Reddit, and WordPress.com blogs.

Big Poppa E, who created the smooth, minimalist GIFs on this page, has been playing around with the Export to Animated GIF feature as a beta tester long enough to amass an impressive collection. He shared with us what it’s like creating for the animated GIF:

Doing the same animation in HTML as opposed to exporting as a GIF makes a huge difference in overall quality and, especially, the smoothness of the animation. I have embraced this challenge by working with simple black and white images to reduce the file size and get the sweetest smoothness I can get.

In the gif called ORBITS5 (below), I played with the concept of “are these black stars against a white field or white flower blossoms against a black backdrop?” It took me a bit to figure out and get everything aligned so the transition from background to foreground didn’t sort of blink, but once I tweaked it a bit, I think I kind of nailed it.

Exporting to animated GIF is one way to overcome the limitations of browsers that struggle with fluidly animating content. For example, you may have noticed that not all browsers support advanced techniques like CSS filter effects and text shadows. Animations exported as animated GIFs overcome these compatibility issues because Tumult Hype renders each frame within the application and builds your GIF from these frames. We’re not advocating that you export all your documents to GIF, but it definitely can be a solution for small and well-defined animations. So what are the limitations of the animated GIF format? There aren’t many:

• Frames from 1/30th of a second to multiple seconds
• 216 Colors, but that’s a lot of colors.

Services like Tumblr set limits on file size and dimensions (1MB and no larger than 500 pixels wide).This is a good limit to ensure your images load quickly for everyone.

We hope you’re inspired to play around with GIFs. For more information about what’s new in Hype 2.5, check out the What’s New page. To export to animated GIF yourself, choose File > Export to Movie > Animated GIF.