How to make animated gif info

Zachris · Post by **Zachris** » Fri May 05, 2006 2:06 pm

Yea I need it! Found this cool thing that i want to make a animated GIF of, but I dont know how soooo the question is if u can tell me how to or where I can find the info on how to. Onegai!

amfest · Post by **amfest** » Sat May 06, 2006 12:57 am

a bit more info plz? . . like are you going to be drawing anything? .. just cropping out a video and making a clip to become an animated gif? . . are you going to be modifying an image to move where it didnt' move before? . . what tools do you have? . . knowledge of images? .. etc etc etc.

Zachris · Post by **Zachris** » Sat May 06, 2006 3:33 am

I want to take a part of a video and make a gif of it, tools well EO video and photoshop is the only programs i have that can be handy for this(what I know) And knowledge about doing this sorta stuff is at a number of 0 well 0,0001 really

amfest · Post by **amfest** » Sat May 06, 2006 4:51 pm

okay . .I had to do some research to find free programs that you can use to aid in the process . .though i'm sure there are better things out there . .this will work . .lol.

first off my favorite program of all time XD

Virtual Dub

http://www.virtualdub.org/

Basically you can video encode to different codecs with this and such . and you can make clips

The beauty of this is that if your gif program doens't support importing avi file clips . then you can save your clip as images per frame of animation. Then in your program you can reassemble it all back together. You can even crop the video . .and such but you'll have to re-encode the video . .. I suggest uncompressed avi since it'll keep that quality but the file size will be rather large.

Okay lets see if I can give you a basic explanation

1. the 2 buttons the 1 sits on aren't really a fast fwd and rewind as you would think but advance the video 1 frame at a time. The two buttons on the outside of that with the Line on either side of them are advance to end or beginning of video.
2. these are keyframe advance typically associated with scene changes and areas you can easily advance to in a video. They can help you get to where you want faster than a single frame by frame play can . .of course use the big slider bar to get around the area you want first ^^
3. These two buttons set your in and out marks for making clips or doing other sorts of things like exporting images like we're going to do
4. if you want to do any resisizing of video or cropping you can do it here unless you batch it somewhere else. Just go into the filters menu and click add to add a filter like resize. In order to crop or clipping as the button says you'll have to add at least 1 filter in order to do it >_> I guess just resize to the desired size or resize to your current size so no change is made which might be better. After you're done with that you can set the codec or not . . I suggest not since if you try it without one it'll audo default to uncompressed avi . .which I recommend. Video menu should be in full processing mode . .also in the audio menu you don't need audio so you can disable it if you're going to make another clip. Then file save as . . and write in your name and .avi (I have an old version where it doesnt' put the .avi on it XD dont' know about recent versions)

After you've done everything you need to do and if you did option 4 then reopened withyour new clip and selected everythign you want . .then just go to file and choose Save image sequence . . be sure to put enough min digits in name . so if you have less than 10 it's 1 .. if it's 10 or more 2 .. 100 . .3 digits . . so you can get the sorting right with no problems. And then save to a directory somewhere.

Now . .for a free program I found to help with gif making. Now this wont' be a great program but it's free and I tested it and it works so far from what I see.

http://www.download.com/Animator-9/3000 ... ag=lst-0-2

Now what you'll do is click the stich button and choose your source directory. It'll bring up your list of images in that directory. Just click on first one hold shift and arrow that baby down to select all or click and drag mouse to select all then click add. after you've done that you can adjust your size of the sequence. click done and it'll give you a save dialog with a jpg extension >_> I found that a bit odd but that isn't your final product. It'll process your images and then go back to main interface. Be sure to uncheck rewind unless you like that sorta thing

and click the control button . .here you can adjust how fast the delay between frames is. Click play to see your delay . . after that click make to create your animated gif.

Made with the program.

You can use photoshop and such to edit your image frames also and there are a few other things you can try and play around with. Like if you want to cut characters out and put a different background or whatever.

As for me I do use virtual dub to get my clip and then I open the avi with Paintshop pro's animation shop by Jasc . . where I can crop there and delete frames and then check my animation . . I can import to paintshop por or save the frames and Open in photoshop, OpenCavnas, flash or Moho . .though with flash I can use animated gifs also and layer on top.

onomeister · Post by **onomeister** » Sun May 07, 2006 1:03 am

wowowow amfest that was an awesome quick tutorial! Almost makes me wanna make one. ALMOST... (has no time though)

Ran · Post by **Ran** » Mon May 08, 2006 3:18 pm

YOU ROCK!!! I've been looking for a good .Gif making program for a while now. Will be DLing once I get home. Thank you!!

amfest · Post by **amfest** » Mon May 08, 2006 7:51 pm

Ran Kizama wrote:YOU ROCK!!! I've been looking for a good .Gif making program for a while now. Will be DLing once I get home. Thank you!!

Well I don't know if you'd call Animator a good animated gif making program .. . lol. It was created for basically slideshowing in a sense digital camera pictures but was extended to images from other places besides digital cameras cause of interest and such. It doesn't have alot of bells and whistles but it does work from what I've tested. I'm sure if you looked really hard you might find a really good freeware gif making program. I just typically start with download.com to check things out since I can easily select freeware and read out user reviews if there are any before downloading.

Either way . .let me know how it all works out ^^.

I also realized the jpg you save before final work is a jpg strip .. a big long strip of the frames all smacked together. those sorta images are pretty good for showing 1 giant large image of screencaps ^^I believe also in virtual dub you can save a clip that way also. haven't tried it but it appears to be int he file drop down list.

Digi Angel · Post by **Digi Angel** » Thu Jun 15, 2006 5:49 pm

In the Gimp, all you have to do is make each clip on a different layer and save as a gif, without flattening the image or merging layers.