BE WARNED: THIS IS PROBABLY THE LONGEST GIF TUTORIAL ON TUMBLR, so you might want to check another one that has easier steps. I believe most people use Photoshop, but I’ve never been too into Photoshop, so I am not one of those people. I do use one program that you pay for, but I am pretty sure there are very similar programs out there, being the GIF animator itself (or you can just use a torrent….). Thumbnail links only work on my actual blog it seems.
Note/Update: I went back to using Ulead GIF animator instead of Easy GIF animator, but as I mention in this post, most GIF animators will probably work.
Also. This is very long, but this is mainly because I write a lot not because the process is actually that long.
First off, I found out the programs to use from THIS tutorial, however I do not use his exact method and I personally find mine a bit easier, but you can always try that one first. I had already made GIFs in the past with ULEAD GIF Animator, but I wanted to start using MKV files since that’s what I have the most of, so I had to switch my method.
But before I even get started, keep in mind that you can learn the exact way the guy (or girl) in the video does them in his video and that’s using all free stuff, I just found that during a certain part of his tutorial I found something else easier for me. The beginning of my tutorial is exactly learned from his, though, so it might be easier to watch the video.
From his info: Programs/Utilites used: (All of them are FREE)
VirtualDub: http://www.virtualdub.org/download.html
VirtualDubMod (“ALL INCLUSIVE” version):http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdubmod/files/VirtualDubMod/VirtualDubM…
AviSynth 2.5: http://avisynth.org/
CCCP: http://www.cccp-project.net/ (you probably already had the cccp to play MKVs in the first place =P)
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And I also personally use: http://www.blumentals.net/egifan/ Easy GIF Animator. I use the ‘Pro’ version but you can probably find another GIF tool, too, since I don’t do too much in GIF Animator.
For a torrent to this tiny program, Google its name ‘torrent’. It takes no time to download and is very easy to install.
For the AviSynth and CCCP, you just need to have them installed. You don’t have to open them every time you make a GIF or anything like that. I was a bit iffy about installing it, but it doesn’t take up much memory or anything like that.
I use torrents to download my anime. I use tokyotosho.info to search for torrents.
I use DVD Video Soft FREE Youtube converter for downloading videos from Youtube when I am in the mood (or just to put on my PSP). http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/free-dvd-video-software.htm
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Make two folders for GIFs. You can put them on your desktop if that’s the easiest. For this I would probably name them GIF1 and GIF2. One is for the VDub files and one is for the actual GIFs when they are done. You can make one folder, but as you can see, I like to complicate things.
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Open VirtualDubMod.
Once open, choose ‘File’, ‘Open Video File’ and then choose your video from where ever you save your videos. Since I am working with MKV files, you want to open the little dropdown menu at the bottom of the page and choose ‘DirectShowSource’, which should make it so you can open the MKV file. If not, you will get an error. This also works for MP4 files.
Once open, I like to zoom out a bit since some of the resolutions are too large for my screen. Right click on the video and choose ‘Zoom’ and pick a %. This is not necessary, though, just something I prefer to do.
You now want to go to the time in the video that you want to make the GIF of. I am going to make a GIF of this scene -
So for this GIF, I would go to the time - 14:29 and press the ‘Mark In’ button which is the little left arrow on the end of the buttons. This chooses the BEGINNING of the GIF. You will see a little black arrow appear under the spot on the line that you chose.
Then you want to go to the end of the scene you want to make the GIF of and choose the ‘Mark Out’ button, which is the right arrow next to it. This is ROUGHLY the GIF you want to make. Note: This GIF is small, but sometimes there will be a lot of space in between the two arrows. I will write something on that after this.
After you have the beginning and end of your GIF, you are going to choose, “File” and then “Save Image Sequence”. Do not change the file type, you want to save it as .tga and do not name them or anything yet. Just choose the directory you want to save the sequence to, which should be a ‘GIF’ folder on your desktop and then hit ‘Ok’. The images between the two arrows will be exported into your GIF folder.
Now it’s time to open VirtualDub. You can close VirtualDubMod. You will see that this looks basically exactly the same.
Once again choose “File” and “Open Video File” but this time choose the 0.tga that you saved from the video into your GIF file. Choosing just ‘0.tga’ will open the entire image sequence that you exported.
You can choose to zoom out again if you want, by right clicking on both pictures and picking a zoom out %.
From here, you want to go through the sequence and delete ALL DOUBLES (usually every 2 pictures). You will see there are a lot of doubles in the sequence. Just click through them with the arrows and hit ‘delete’ on all the doubles. You will see that doing this takes the frames from 50 to about 15, which is a very large difference.
Now you can start to fine tune it if you wish, since there are some frames that aren’t QUITE double, but they are EXTREMELY similar and hence, not really necessary in a GIF.
Once you are done fine tuning, you want to do what you did in the first video - Mark In and Mark Out at the beginning and ends of your soon-to-be-GIF. You can just do this at the beginning and end of the sequence.
Now you want to choose “File”, then “Export”, “Image Sequence”.
Then choose a name for your GIF (I chose zombie), choose the directory you want to put these into (other GIF folder on your desktop) and choose ‘JPEG’ format. Then hit OK. This will take the scene that you marked and turn it into JPEG files, which are image files that you can actually work with.
Now you can close VDubMod and open Easy GIF Animator.
NOTE: At this point you can open these images in probably any GIF Animator or Paint program that lets you crop images together and animate them.
In Easy GIF Animator, choose ‘File’ and then “New Animation Wizard”.This will open up an option to let you add images to the wizard. Choose all your ‘zombie’ images from the directory you saved them into and hit ‘Open’.
Once all the images are loaded, hit “Next” and change the frame rate to 10 and hit next, next. You don’t need to change anything else. 10 isn’t ALWAYS the perfect frame rate, but you can adjust it by eye after.
Now all your images should load into Easy GIF Animator. Since they are large, it might take a couple of seconds.
Once loaded, the first thing I do is change the resolution to 500 x whatever. To do this hit “Animation” on the top bar and then choose “Resize Animation”. Click both of the options there: “Smooth Resize” + “Maintain Aspect Ratio” if they aren’t already chosen and then hit “OK”. This will resize your image to 500 x whatever resolution you were using, which is the ideal resolution for Tumblr (even though I sometimes go smaller to fit the file size).
And for now, you are just about done. Preview it by hitting ‘Preview’ and see if it looks too fast or slow. If it looks too fast, raise the frame rate a little to 12-15 and see how it looks. Now save by choosing ‘save as’ and hitting ‘Do not merge palettes’. I have found that this prevents the GIFs from having little circles on them as they sometimes do from using this method. Name and save.
Now check the GIF to see the file size. For Tumblr GIFs to work appropriately they must be 500kb or under. Since this is a kind of simple GIF, it is most definitely under the max size for Tumblr GIFs to animate properly, 500kb, but most GIFs usually come out a big larger if they have more frames to them or frames with a lot of different things in them. If this is the case you can do two things:
1] Delete more of the frames that are the most similar to each other.
2] Decrease the resolution to something lower than 500 x . Personally, I do this occasionally when I find I have to delete too many frames and it looks weird, but not below 400 usually.
And that’s it. Well, that made it sound short, but yes, that is the end.
Once you get used to this method it usually takes about 5-10 minutes to make a GIF, or even shorter if it’s really simple.
And some notes:
You can also lightly edit your GIFs in Easy GIF animator with saturation and stuff, but you can always just do that in any paint program before importing them into Easy GIF Animator.
When I make GIFs of hair, I like them to animate very nicely, so I usually take a few pictures of hair from the beginning and paste them backwards at the end of the animation, so the hair has the image flowing backwards again before restarting.
If you see that there are little pauses in your animation when viewing it, it is probably because there are double frames.
So. In short.
1] Open video in VDubMod
2] Mark your area for beginning and end of GIF and export
3] Open VDub and import from 0.tga
4] Delete doubles from animation and save image sequence
5] Open GIF in GIF Animator - Resize, Save, check file size, delete or resize more frames if necessary.
The end.
I don’t even know why I wrote this now that I am done. o.o Posting before I add pictures just in case it messes up.
Also, if you actually do attempt this method for some reason, I am always open to questions about it since, well, it’s complicated.
