Thread: I create animated GIFs, from movie clips, see my work and make requests!

Originally Posted by adenai

PekH: anyone can do it with any "movie to gif converter" . It's no magic - it's as simple as it sounds.

Your attempt at being cool has failed ;)

Sure anyone can do it, but a lot of people won't. Not only that you have to do some work so it is smaller than a certain filesize, so it can play correctly in Internet Explorer and Opera, and it might take a while in order to get good at. But the reason why I want to take requests is that I already have the setup and the knowledge. BTW, I use GIF Movie Gear, and I have no idea what everyone else uses, I just do my little thing. Here is some instructions I wrote a long time ago to make an effective GIF yourself.

BTW, in the steps below it is going to mention look at my sample GIFs as an example what to do, but I don't have them, so just ignore that.

Well let’s start from the beginning, to obtain YouTube videos.
1. To download YouTube videos, copy the URL and paste it into this text box. What I did was set that text box as a quick search in Opera, so all I have to do for me is in the URL bar is put a "s " in front of the URL and hit enter and it will bring me to a page to save the video. Very quick. If you have Opera just right click the text box and go to create search. You choose a hotkey to trigger the search in the future. If you chose “s” to be the hotkey, just put “s http://youtube.com/watch?v=NnYnEP-YXNs” in the URL to go to the page to download the video. Otherwise just copy the URL and paste it in the text box in the site below.
KeepVid: Download and save any video from Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, iFilm and more!

2. It is a FLV file, and you can use VLC media player or KMPlayer to play them. I use KMPlayer, but you can use antoher program if you want to convert the FLV to something else and then make a clip of it, or make a clip directly from the FLV.
Download latest beta of KMPlayer, the betas with KMPlayer are very stable.
Download KMPlayer: http://www.kmplayer.com/beta/kmp.zip

3. With KMPlayer they have the easiest clip capturing feature I have ever seen. Just go to around two seconds before your clip you want to take. Press ALt + C, and a window will pop up. At the top press the directory and filename you want, and choose AVI. Bubble "Encode with video processes" and the same thing with Audio OR Diable audio if you don’t want to view the clip later.

4. Press start on the window and not the video clip you want yet. Wait for "0 bytes" to appear on the window, when this happens just click the play button and it will start recording from there. Once your clip is fully done just hit stop.

5. Now that you have your AVI file, you can now make frames out of it. To do so download a GIF creating program called GIF Movie Gear. Import the AVI file and you will see all the frames from it. Cut out the frames you don't want. I suggest you to save as a GIF at this point, so if you make a msitake you won't have to go back to cutting out the frames and other tediuos work.

6. Now comes the more difficult part. Reducing the filesize so it won't take forever for everyone who is looking at your GIFs to download them. The first thing I would do is to crop the part of the screen that you won't need, this can be black bars or a section where the animation doesn't occur or a section you just don't need. To crop every frame, Animation > Crop…. If you are sure about what you just did, save. Otherwise save it as “wuteva 2” or something. Every time after saving, check to see if it meet your filesize requirements.

7. Preview to see what you have so far. Is it too slow? Does it loop properly? Is it done, but all it needs is it being under a MB? To speed it up a bit you can change the timing. Timing can be changed by lowering or raising the number next to the clock at the top of the screen. In the picture below it is a 4. This number represents how long it stays on that frame. 4 meaning 4/100th of a second. Lower the number to make it faster. It is possible that you don’t see any number there and the only way to make it faster is to reduce the frames which will be explained in step 11. To make it loop properly is to make the last frame as similar as to the first frame, to do this you will need everything in its original position. You could delete some frames at the beginning or end to do so. Another way you can loop if the camera changes angle or focuses on something else, like for example it shows Person A being punched by Person B, and then it goes to Person A punching Person B. You can see an example of this in the GIF below called Punch. In most videos this will not be possible, so don’t bother looping if this is the case. There is also another looping method that is explained in Step 13.

8. Another thing you should try to reduce the file size is optimization. The great thing about optimizations is that it won’t lower the quality in any way, all it would do bad is that make further editing difficult, so don’t do this until it tells you it would be under a MB. I suggest you to optimize even if it is under a MB so it can be smaller and easier to load. Go to optimization under Animation. Have everything checked off except for “Manual Operation”. Then see how many bytes the GIF would be after optimization. If it isn’t less than 1 048 576 bytes, then don’t do it yet since it can screw up the process if you did click optimize and want to continue editing. Just go back the animation menu and click unoptimize and everything will be fine unless you did something else between optimizing and unoptimizing. Go to Optimize after doing every step to see if it would be under your filesize requirement yet.

9. Resizing the frames, a very quick way to reduce the file size and sometimes makes the GIF look better. Resizing is pretty simple and I highly suggest keeping the original aspect ratio, unless it is screwed up in the first place.

11. Reducing frames, which deletes a frame every ‘x’ frames. This ‘x’ value is chosen by you. If ‘x’ is two, then you will have half the frames you had before. If ‘x’ is four, then you will have three-fourths of the frames you had before. Reducing frames may speed up the final GIF, but it may not be shown how much it will speed up under this program’s preview mode. If you delete every other frame, then it will be twice as fast as it was before if it actually does speed up. Reducing the frames may also make it seem laggy a bit. I haven’t experimented too much with this feature so I would try it out yourself.

12. Reducing colors is a nice way to shave off on the file size. The reduction in color may not be even noticeable, especially while animated. You can look the right to see how much it reduced. You may be able to reduce the palette to 64, and you won’t see anything different and still shave off 10% of the file.

13. Making everything go back and forth like the Look GIF and Slide GIF shown below. If you don’t want that, continue to Step 14. This step can be annoying if you have 20 frames. I don’t know how make it do this automatically, but to do it manually. Click the second last frame and paste it after the last frame. Do the same thing with the third last frame and so one until the second frame where you do that as well. When you preview the GIF it should be going back and forth. Sorry for this poor explanation, if you want me to clarify it even more, then just ask.

14. If you are sure you have everything correct, save your GIF and see if it is under your filesize requirement yet. If it is, congratulations and you can now upload the file. If it is still above your filesize requiremetnt, try doing all the previous steps again but crop a little more for example or make the palette smaller. If it is still over your filesize requirement, the best way to make it under it is resizing it. If you are still having problems save the GIF and upload it to Imageshack or someplace and PM me for help.