Exporting
Getting a looping GIF or an MP4 out of the workshop, and which to pick.
Two buttons in the header export your animation: GIF and MP4. Both run entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and nothing is queued behind anyone else's job.
GIF or MP4
| GIF | MP4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Loops on its own | Yes | Depends on the player |
| Colours | 256 | Full |
| File size | Large | Small |
| Plays in a chat window | Yes | Usually |
Pick GIF for a short loop you want to paste somewhere and have it just play. Line art on white is exactly what GIF's limited palette handles well, so the usual objection to it does not really apply to this kind of work.
Pick MP4 for anything long, anything with a lot of colour or shading, or anything headed for a video timeline. A GIF of a long animation gets very large very quickly.
How it works
Every frame is redrawn from scratch at your canvas's full resolution, composited onto a white background, and then encoded. The export does not use the thumbnails or anything you see on screen, so zoom level and onion skin settings have no effect on the result.
Progress runs through two stages. Rendering redraws the frames, then encoding packs them into a file. The button shows a percentage across both.
The frame rate of the export is whatever the timeline is set to.
Exports run on your machine, so a long animation at A3 will take a while and will make a laptop fan audible. This is the trade for it being free, private, and not sitting in a queue.
Transparency
Exports are flattened onto white. The canvas itself is transparent while you draw, which is what lets onion skins show through, but both formats get a solid white background on the way out.
Resolution
The export resolution is the canvas size you chose in the header. See canvas sizes for the full list. If you need a different resolution, set it before you draw rather than after, because changing the canvas size does not move the strokes already on it.