Danbooru

making gifs?

Posted under General

c09

I make mind using Adobe Premiere, but that's a much lobger process I would like and the program isn't free.

There was a freeware software, I'll post when I can remember the name of it.

Reply
piespy

If you want to use free software, you can make them with the Gimp, but you need to add each frame manually as a layer so it's rather tedious that way.

You can also make them with ImageMagick, e.g. using the command line "convert" program to take a series of images (one frame per image) and merge them into one gif. That'll take some editing and optimizing in the Gimp too though (especially the "optimize for GIF" filter) or the gif will be needlessly huge, and ImageMagick isn't very good at picking a common palette so it's best if you've converted them to 256-color files using a common palette first.

For that it's usually good enough to take a frame in the middle and have the Gimp convert it to 256 colors with an optimized palette, and use that for converting the rest of the frames using ImageMagick again. Or if you're some kind of wizard you can write a Script-fu script in the Gimp to automate the process of having the Gimp convert all images to a common palette. Though for best results, especially if the various frames have very different colors, you'd use the ImageMagick "montage" program to put all frames on a single sheet, then optimize and use the palette from that. And if possible, avoid using dithering during the conversion because that also makes the gif much larger. If it really is needed try using it only on the specific frames that need it.

If you're working with screencaps, it's a must to reduce the image dimensions to average out compression artefacts, which would otherwise also needlessly increase the gif filesize. Working from a high quality raw helps too, don't try it with youtube vids.

For extracting frames from a movie file I like to use mplayer, with the jpeg (or png, though there is little benefit in that) video output driver, and setting a start position and number of frames to capture. If the video is anamorphic you'll have to specify X and Y dimensions explicitly or mplayer will write the unscaled (and hence wrong aspect ratio) frames. It can also do the downscaling that way, if you do that the png output driver is best because you're not going to average out the compression artefacts by downscaling later.

Also don't forget that for gifs, it's usually enough to capture only every 3, 4 or 5 frames because having them at 25 fps is excessive and many programs can't even show them with that framerate. You can tell mplayer to only save every nth frame to make this easier, or manually delete the files.

Updated

Reply
parasol

piespy said:
you can make them with the Gimp, but you need to add each frame manually as a layer so it's rather tedious that way.

File -> Open as Layer...

You can select multiple files to import, at least in recent versions. Though maybe that's what you meant by 'manually'.

Reply
piespy

parasol said:
File -> Open as Layer...

You can select multiple files to import, at least in recent versions. Though maybe that's what you meant by 'manually'.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong but this always puts them in the reverse order, regardless of how I select them. But ImageMagick's convert does that job fine so I never bothered to investigate into this problem.

Reply
Aline

The free software is called Animagic, but only use this one if you already converted the colors properly on a better program, because this one is animating-only. Also, it's sort of a beta, or something, if it doesn't save, simply change your computer clock in one year (don't forget to undo the change after saving the results)

Reply
Quess

Aline said:
The free software is called Animagic...
...if it doesn't save, simply change your computer clock in one year (don't forget to undo the change after saving the results)

That's not free software. That's free-to-try software.

Reply
1