How to Convert Movie Scenes into Animated GIFs

HOW TO CREATE GIF ANIMATIONS?

There are free tools available that let you easily convert video clips into animated GIFs that you can later host on sites like Flickr or Tumblr – not all image hosting sites support animated GIFs but the one mentioned here do.

This is a two-step process – first convert the video into a sequence of image frames and then assemble these frames into a looping GIF animation with some custom delay.

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: Now 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 have a fairly long video file and would only 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

The parameter ‘ss’ refers to the start position in the video while ‘t’ is the duration for which you want to extract the frames. So in the above example, image frames for the file movie.avi will be at created from the 5 second mark for the next 3 seconds on the video.

If you would like to stop GIFs from animating in the browser, just hit the Escape key.

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Create GIF Screencasts with SnagIt for Chrome

SnagIt, the popular screen capture program for Windows and Mac, is also available for Google Chrome. The extension is free and it can capture screenshots of your desktop as well as screencast videos. The recorded videos can be directly uploaded to YouTube or Google Drive from within the SnagIt app itself.

The most recent version of SnagIt for Chrome can save your screencast video as an animated GIF, a format that is perfect for publishing quick & short demos. The only condition is that the duration of your recorded video should be 20 seconds or less. The GIF is sent to your Google Drive for quick sharing or you can download it locally as well.

If you are not using the latest version of Google Chrome, it may take a few steps to enable screencasting support inside your browser.

The first step is to install the SnagIt app and extension from the Chrome Store. Next type chrome://flags in the browser address bar and enable the setting that says Enable Screen Capture Support in getUserMedia(). Restart the Chrome browser.

Internally, like the other screen sharing apps for Chrome, SnagIt is using WebRTC to record the screencast. When you hit the record button, it starts a private screen sharing session, with no other participants, and all your on-screen activity during the session is saved as an .AVI video.

The only downside is that SnagIt for Chrome can either record the entire desktop screen or an individual browser window but there’s no option to select a custom area for recording. Maybe its more a limitation of the browser platform than the app itself.

The other good alternative is the Screencastify extension for Chrome. It lets you screen record individual browser tabs or the entire desktop screen. Videos are recorded as .webm files that play in nearly all modern browser without requiring plugins. The screencast videos can also be uploaded to Youtube and Google Drive but it doesn’t do GIFs though.

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Save SlideShare Presentations as Animated GIFs

A web called GIFDeck helps you convert any presentation hosted on SlideShare into an animated GIF file. All you have to do is specify the deck URL and the app will fetch the individual slides as images and stitches them all together in a single GIF that will auto-play and auto-loop.

Here’s a sample GIF created from a SlidShare presentation on Steve Jobs. The app only converts the initial 10 slides, probably to keep the size of GIF within limits, but you do have an option to queue all the slides of a deck for conversion.

While SlideShare does offer an HTML5 based option to embed presentations on external websites, the GIF based approach will still come handy in many situations. For instance, you can send your presentation in an email message – just drag the GIF in your Gmail compose window – and recipients will be able to scan through the deck right inside their email client.

Similarly, you can tweet the GIF or post it on Tumblr and the people can quickly view your slides in any browser or email client. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t support animated GIFs yet.

Internally, the GIF Deck app uses the GIF.js library to convert the individual deck images into a GIF image. The library supports all modern web browsers and it does the conversion in the client’s browser.

The only downside is that the generated GIF images aren’t optimized so if you are trying to convert an image-heavy presentation into a GIF, the image file could easily run into a few megabytes. The app’s source code can be found on Github.

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