Or, you can just upload movies at [blibs.com] and it instantly turns it into an animated gif. It also automatically drops frames, depending on the length of the movie, to ensure a small enough gif. Warning though, animated GIFs are much larger in file size.

dognose

Though it's not exactly free, I use VirtualDub and Adobe ImageReady myself. With VirtualDub I shorten the video to just the clip I want to turn into a GIF and open it in ImageReady. It's a tiny bit time-consuming, but the method I used to use involved copying and pasting individual frames. Not fun.

This looks interesting, though. I'll try it out!

Miyabi

A free alternative for Macs: MPEG Streamclip. It can export as an "image sequence" (in the format and framerate of your choice), which can then be opened in GIMP. No command line required. There's supposedly a version for Windows too, but I haven't been able to make it work.

Flyne

ps, just had another look at bink and it converts many video files to avi, wav, flc, bmp, gif, jpg, tga, tif, pcx, and png. It can even save a video file as an .exe that will play on Mac or Windows computers...

da5id_nz

@Flyne: MPEG Streamclip I think is the BEST when it comes to converting movies to H264 for iPod - it has built-in settings to encoding to the different iPod types. How have you not been able to get it work?
You do need Quicktime or Quicktime Alternative installed.

For making animated gifs out of movie clips, I use the free program BINK and SMACKER programs from rad game tools. If you haven't used BINK before, it does all kinds of things including exporting video is separate frames which you can import into a gif animator.

Here's a blurb from their site -

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Quick Introduction:

The RAD Video Tools are a set of utilities for processing video, animation, and sound data. They feature both of our video codecs: Bink Video, our latest 24-bit true-color codec, and Smacker, our 8-bit 256-color codec.

Bink Video is a "better-than-DVD" video codec. That is, it compresses better than DVD at up to three times the playback speed! Bink is a hybrid block-transform and wavelet codec that can encode your video using 16 different compression techniques (wavelet, DCT, motion compensation, a variety of vector quantizers, Smacker-style, and more). With all of these techniques in one codec, Bink can handle pretty much any type of video. It also has a psycho-acoustic based audio codec that is capable of 8 to 1 perceptually lossless compression, so your audio will sound as good as your video looks!

Smacker is our 256-color compressor for video and animation. It has used in all aspects of multimedia application design: cinematics, cut-scenes, video-sprites, transparent videos, single-image decompression, scrolling video backgrounds, and more. Smacker has been used in over 2,000 games because it's fast, it's easy-to-license, it has a terrific SDK, and its video quality is unrivaled in 256 color mode.

da5id_nz

Also a heads-up that there is a free utility called Topaz Moment at giveawayoftheday today which is supposed to take great still frames (or a series of frames) from video files and DVDs. It's gotten an 84% thumbs up so far.

I've had a play and it's very good. If your video or DVD is already clean, set to 'Raw capture'. Otherwise it will take video from a series of frames and enhance and noise reduce.

da5id_nz

Although it's not the most intuitive to use, SUPER can do this for you too.

[www.erightsoft.info]

SciotoSurfer

For making an animated gif for avatars, I use 'Video Avatar,' is ridiculously easy.

rdldr1

Animated gifs seem to still be used heavily by the guys designing all the display ads across the web. Kinda like those silly mortgage ones meant to grab our attention.

trueguy

My, My that would be the last way I would create an animated gif these days. There are tons of online services that will do this. If you don't like that idea then consider a tool kit of -

- Firefox extension
- mplayer
- phatch
- gifsicle.

I could not imagine using GIMP to do a 300 frame sequence manually. My finger tips would be raw.

JohnMc

@da5id_nz: Interesting. Bink is also the codec that Valve uses for their video in games like Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. Looks like that toolset is Windows only, but they have a video player available for Linux. I wonder if they'd make the tools available for Linux too...

ahfr

Hi there,
Glad to see you picked up my article. Hope readers find it helpful.

ahfr

This is cool, but for those of us that don't have linux and do have Flash take a look here: [dev.protitude.com]
This explains how to create animated gifs from video using Flash. It's a little more intense of a process, but it works. Especially if you want to edit the frames before you make them a gif...

gizwex

Animated GIFs do have a sort of retro charm to them; I kind of laugh at the 8-bit dithering, then smile.

This is one of my fave animated GIFs made from a movie: [uneasysilence.com]

Torley

Any Mac user can do this with GraphicConverter. It's had this capability for like the past ten years.

sgodun

@Miyabi: Actually, VirtualDub [www.virtualdub.org] can export to Animated GIF directly. I think it's under Export in the File menu.

You can also use SUPER to convert to animated GIF. Go under Output Format and choose "Animated GIF (for making avatars)" [www.erightsoft.com]

MePerson

GifNinja is the easiest. Convert images or video to animated gifs:

[www.gifninja.com]

TheBestChickEver

Another easy one to use (like previously mentioned ones) is [zamzar.com] (mentioned here: [lifehacker.com]). You can just upload a video file and tell it to convert to GIF. I've only tested this with MP4 (because that's what my phone records in), but I'm sure it will work with others.

Destrox