Tutorial On How to Create GIF Animations
Do you know that you can easily convert your choice video clips into animated GIFs that you can later host on sites like Flickr or Tumblr?
This choice videos could be personal videos, movies, musical videos or documentary just to spice up your profiles on this social media or for personal use.
– Remember that is not all sites that permit the hosting animated GIFs but the one mentioned here do. This article will give you an easy walkthrough and a simple two-step process on how to Create GIF Animations –this is how it works; firstly we are going convert the video into a sequence of image frames and when we are done with that assemble these frames into a looping GIF animation with some custom delay which we are going to expose to you like ABC.
Step 1:
Download FFmpeg and extract the ffmpeg.exe file to, say, the c:\ffmpeg\ folder. The .7z files can be unzipped using the 7-zip utility.
Step 2:
This time around, we’ll extract the frames from our video file. The command* is simple. c:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -i movie.avi img-%03d.gif If your video file is in another folder, you need to specify the full path of that file. Also, you may use MP4, MOV or any video format as well instead of AVI.
Step 3:
Grab this portable utility called UnFreez and drag-n-drop all the image frames created in the previous step from Windows Explorer into the UnFreez window. Enable “loop animation” and set the frame delay to say 20 cs (1 cs = 0.01 second).
Click “Make animated GIF” and preview your image is in any browser. [*] If you are having too lengthy video file and would and you feel like to convert a portion of it into an image, you need to slightly modify the ffmpeg parameters as shown below: c:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -i movie.avi – ss 5 – t 3 img-%03d.gif
Note: make sure that this modification is properly done to suite or match what is written above or else you might get contrary result The parameter ‘ss’ refers to the start position in the video while ‘t’ is the duration for which you want to extract the frames.
What this mean is that if you carry out your exercise as shown above, with your parameter ‘ss’ =5 and duration ‘t’ = 3, the image frames for the file movie.avi will be at created from the 5 second mark for the next 3 seconds on the video. You can also stop the GIFs you have created from animating in the browser by just pressing your Escape key on your key board.