I tried searching on the forum, but I could find nothing about how this is done

Basically, I want to create an animated gif which is derived from a video. Lets say I have this video file, and I want to create an animated gif which shows what the video is about. I have already trimed the video appropriately but when I tried doing it, I ended up with a 8.32 MB animated gif.

I thought animated gif was supposed to be lightweight, can anyone help me?

Thanks in advance

It's lightweight when you customize it to be so It depends on the quality ofcourse. You could use Jasc Animation shop, just load the file, choose how many frames you want there to be, trim if necessary, resize if necessary, then save, and in the optimization menu walk-through thingie, take the steps to minimize the file size by choosing the amount of colors and stuff. So yeah, the more frames, the bigger the size, and the less compression of the images, the bigger the file size will be aswell. Ofcourse a smooth 5 second duration .gif file with image size 1024x768 pixels will be huuuuge.

If you want to animate .gif images i suggest getting unFREEze gif animator. (Search it on google) it works well and lets you pick how many frames per second but it dosn't let you do much. I would suggest looking on www.google.com

What might be happening is that each of your frames might have its own palette. Each palette in a GIF file takes up 768 bytes, if you have a lot of frames that really adds up. Try using GIF Construction Set (google it), it has a lot of ways that it can decrease file size. You one palette for the entire thing, but this limits you to a total of 256 colors. Decreasing your frame rate will also decrease the size of your video by A LOT.

good question darran. i had some problems when making gif files from Flash MX 2004, i couldn't make animated gif file right. flash just exported SWF in images (i had about 20 frames and Flash exported 20 *.gif files).
I might just try one of these programs. I guess both of them can be found in Trial version and i hope at least one is free

Quick question. Do you have Photoshop and Imageready? If so, you *can* open some video files in Imageready, and take out every x frames. It's used for making those animated sigs with small vids in them. (I've done a couple)

If you have those, reply back and I'll try to help.

Wow ... I didn't expect to have 5 replies in just less than 2 days. Really amazing feedback.

unFREEze: This application just threads all the gif images, what I need is an application which will help me to take a video and return many gif images for me to thread it through.

I will give this applications a try and let you know
- Jasc Animation (By far the most promising) Is the full name animation shop 3?
- GIF Construction Set (I suppose this simply reduce the frame rate but does not construct the animated gif I want)

@Sharn: I have photoshop and imageready but I had no idea they could accept video files. I took a look at the formats they accept, but I don't see any wmv or even mpg for that matter so how do you put those files into imageready?

I think a potential problem could be because I am using a wmv as my source file to trim the video and then the format I work with is wmv, does anyone knows if this plays a difference?

This post has been edited by darran: Nov 15 2006, 03:50 AM

This is a part 'Paint shop Pro' there is a trial version available (of 30 days I think).
I used to use this program for making aniamted Gifs (works fine).
You can add an gif image (and setup also the time to display).

You can also add some (predefined) transittions.
The program used to by Jasc, but I think Corel has bought the program and Corel sells it now.
There are still some shareware sites on the internet where you can download the programm.

it is pretty straight forward first you need to go and find a program to do this and then download it. most of the programs are free and the ones that arn't are demos foe a certain period of time. so it should be quite easy to find one that wil lsuit your need just go to google and search for make animated gifs or make animated picture or something like that and you should find a few programs to do this type of thing !


normally these programs will take any picture format so you just go and find the pictures you want to animate and put it into the program and then create it and then it is all done you have an animated picture to look at or use or do anything with


It is that easy there are no hard things or catches