Exporting as .gif as you are aware seriously degrades the quality of the animation. Mp4 is a much better compression standard , it would be fantastic to be able to render output into .mp4’ , otherwise aseprite is unfortunately not a tool I can use to create high quality animations. Even though photoshop is a much clunkier and unfriendly workflow than aseprite , the final result is much higher quality when rendered in .mp4/1080p so it’s unfortunately what I use despite my wanting to be able to work inside aseprite exclusively.
For pixel art specifically, GIF is usually lossless as the compression is lossless as long as your palette is <=256 colours (most pixel art gets nowhere near that), whereas MP4 has forced visual degradation as part of its compression.
For unusual formats such as MP4, Aseprite lets you export individual frames as PNGs, so that you compose the lossless frames into any video format you like.
so if the image is indexed color mode it should be lossless?
.png doesn’t support layers though, when i export an animation as .png’s, it just stacks all the layers into one flat image per frame. the result is an incremental building of all the frames on top of one another in one image.
The mode doesn’t matter, and in fact, Aseprite’s Indexed Color mode supports palettes larger than 256 colours (albeit not very well). What’s important is that when you export your image, each frame uses 256 colours or fewer.
MP4 doesn’t support layers either, so I don’t see how that’s relevant? Your .aseprite file would have your layers, and when your animation is finished and ready for export, you’d export a gif, or a sequence of PNG frames to convert to an MP4 or other format that’s not supported by Aseprite.
ok i understand, i believe i was exceeding 256 colors in RGB mode and this was causing my compression issues in gifs.
I am probably not explaining my issue with exporting .png’s correctly, but when I export, the animation is getting accumulated into one image. The previous frames which shouldnt be visible are all stacking on top of each other, making a giant mess , whereas you dont see that mess in the playback in aseprite.
Ah, I believe you need to include a number in your PNG filename when exporting, and then Aseprite will prompt you about saving each frame individually as numbered PNGs.
ok thanks for your help, turns out it wasn’t an issue with aseprite at all , just an issue with me lol – thanks
This is a bit of a hidden feature, and it would be nice if Aseprite offered a checkbox or a prompt when saving animations to formats that don’t support them, instead of relying on the filename.