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I'm making a series of animated gifs witch I design using adobe flash. The problem is that when I export it to the animated gif format, it pixelates losing a lot of quality.

I wanted to know if theres a way or format that will allow me to export this with a decent quality, or if theres a program to use as a bridge to do so. I'm using CS5 by the way.

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    I think you might be confusing pixelation and dithering. ( see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Steinberg_dithering ). GIF is limited to 256 colors (or less), so some colors must be simulated. Animated PNG is an alternative, but browser support is probably not as good as with GIF ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG )
    – horatio
    Commented Jun 9, 2011 at 19:59
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    Flash doesn't export nice looking .gif files. You can try to export your animation as a PNG sequence then open that as a sequence in Fireworks(frames will be added automatically) and export an animated .gif from there. You'll have more control (over image(number of colours) and animation(repeats,timing)) for gif export. Another alternative that comes to mind is to use the AS3 GIF Encoder library to export a decent gif via code, but that's handy if you're comfortable programming in actionscript 3
    – George Profenza
    Commented Sep 29, 2012 at 9:36

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Export png sequence from Flash. Import to Photoshop as images sequence. Save for web in Photoshop as animated gif. Much better results and proper colors and dither handling by Photoshop.

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GIF is not designed for high-quality images. Smooth vectors from Flash will end up pixelated in GIFs no matter what you do. Photos and the like will generally look bad because of the reduced palette. Dithering can help, but the end result will still be much lower quality.

If you want an animation, you should really be using straight Flash and not GIFs (apart from very simple ones where the quality is not degraded). Or possibly a video format depending on your needs — most large gif-hosting sites seem to have moved to MP4 or WEBM for their primary data.

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You might want to check out Google Swiffy:

Google Swiffy logo

Swiffy converts Flash SWF files to HTML5, allowing you to reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (such as iPhones and iPads). Swiffy can't yet convert DoubleClick Studio creatives.

New! Swiffy now supports ActionScript 3.0 and external resource loading. Getting started with Swiffy.

On the first link, you will find an upload form that you can use to send the SWF file.
In return you will get an onscreen preview of your animation already converted, along with a HTML document for you to download.

They do all the work for you. I've tested it with basic animations and it works great.

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Dudes,

Its good to export (file->Export->Image Movie->Sequence gif) the .flash file to gif sequence and let it do animate in photoshop.Its finely worked for me.Thanks

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I was creating a sound wave(very sharp edges) animation in Photoshop myself and having the same problem.

The image was 800px wide and result = pixelated

Solution:

Make it @3x, in my scenario 2400px, and result = awesome!

Note: Don't forget to specify its width(1x) in html

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In Flash-

Click on "Publish Settings" Check on "GIF image" than Click on "GIF" tab Choose "Animated" in Playback, Choose "Adaptive" in Palette Type and enter "99999" in Max colors and Click Publish.

I think it solve your problem.

Jiten

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    If you need a single frame gif, sure, although this kind of defeats the purpose of using it in the first place. If you need a multiple frame (animated) gif this won't work since the number of max colors is 256 no matter what you type.
    – Raydot
    Commented Jun 7, 2016 at 20:07

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