The making your own GIFS thread

[Mattman]

Hey everyone. I was just sitting here lurking the board and admiring the numerous GIF sigs as always when a thought occurred to me. I would like to learn how to make my own GIFS, or at least start a thread where my fellow posters can point me in the right direction where to learn how to make my own. And I figured I wasn't alone, so here we go.

Please post any suggestions you may have. For example, let's say I wanted to make a GIF of Edward Burns from Brother's McMullen running his fingers through his greasy ass hair with the words WASH YOUR FUCKING HAIR at the bottom -- how would I do that?

[Patrick King]

I know Adobe Premiere allows you to export as a gif, you can also make them in Flash, but the color palette is really limited.

[Whip]

Animated, you mean? Or just still GIFS?

[Hollingsworth]

You can make them in Photoshop or ImageReady. Can't recall which. Just read the help docs with Photoshop and it tells you how.

[Cth]

ImageReady.

I used to use it all the time to make gifs. It's since been folded into Photoshop with CS3, I believe.

There's freeware solutions out there as well, but most put watermarks on your gifs until you register.

It's just like making a cartoon flipbook mixed with Photoshop. On the bottom left, you have your flip-pages. Each page references what layers you have turned on. When you create a new flip-page, you toggle what layers you want on.

IE:
Flip-pages: [1][2][3][4]

[1] - Background; Text (layers on)
[2] - Background (layers on)
[3] - Background; Text (layers on)
[4] - Background (layers on)

This would create a 4 image sequence of a picture with some text that blinks on and off.

Below each page, it lets you specify a delay if you want one. Dramatic pauses to show the exact moment someone gets slapped usually with some text saying "POW!" or something along those lines.

In the above example:

Flip-pages: [1][2][3][4]

[1] - Background; Text 1 "WATCH OUT!" (layers on) Text 2 (layer off) [1.0 second]
[2] - Background (layers on) [0.25 second]
[3] - Background; Text 2 "OWNED!" (layers on) Text 1 (layer off) [3.0 seconds]
[4] - Background (layers on) [0.25 second]

At this point, you can specify if you want the gif to loop from frame 4 back to 1, or just animate once.

It sounds complicated, but it's really easy.

------

Anyways, you can grab stuff from DVDs/AVIs/etc. You open the movie/clip in Adobe ImageReady and specify the start and finish points. You can manually navigate to the point and drag the stop point (or use the keyboard for precise navigation)

The software will prompt you about dropping frames to conserve disk space and memory. It may ask how often to sample images from the source. I usually went with the defaults.

Either way, once you get a source, it may be too big STILL. So once it's grabbed, try to export it, so you'll see roughly how big the image is. If it's too big (let's say 5mb+) you may want to resize the canvas (shrinking the entire image) or you can shrink the focus area to clip away stuff you don't need.

Hope this helps.

Some tutorials that might explain it better (with pics) (quick google search, there's a lot out there)
http://comers.citadel.edu/tutorials/gifTutorial.htm
http://www.myjanee.com/tuts/animation/animation.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5e2E...eature=related

[Patrick King]

Cth I gotta ask, is that Kari from Mythbusters in your sig, and what is she saying (or supposed to be saying)?

[Cth]

It is, and I have no idea, sorry

[Dreaded Anomaly]

ImageReady is great for custom gifs.

If you're looking for something simpler, though, (like just turning a movie clip into an animated gif), VirtualDub can export .avi files to animated gifs. There are other programs that have more settings for this kind of thing, like BitSoft's 123 Avi to Gif Converter, but they cost money.

If the movie clip you have isn't in .avi format, use WinFF to convert it.

It can also be useful to use one of these programs to make the movie clip into a gif, and then open it in ImageReady and edit it. (Sometimes this causes the palette to get fucked up, which is hard to fix with ImageReady 7.0, but I would hope they have improved the palette control in the CS+ versions.)