Compact Animations on Demand: What Is the Easiest Way to Create a GIF Animation from a Video File?

GIFs are great for marketing, getting followers or to punctuate a good post or article. There are many ways to make GIFs, such as animating your own by hand or making several images play in sequential order. One of the best ways is to take a video file and make a small clip of that into a GIF. This will show you how to turn a video into a GIF that you can upload on your favorite social media outlet or website.

Choose a Video

Before going any further, you have to choose a video and a segment that you’d like to turn into a GIF. Sometimes the hardest part of turning a video into a GIF is finding the exact segment that you want to capture.

The format of the video usually doesn’t matter, but MP4 tends to be the most common. Most software that can convert videos to GIFs can use any type of video file, but be sure to check the specific software to see if there are any restrictions.

What’s more important is quality. While most conversion and snipping programs allow you to change quality, nothing can salvage a bad video. Make sure that you choose a high-quality video that is easy to see without any pixels or distortions.

Snipping Program

Choose a snipping program. There are many ways to turn a video into a GIF, but a snipping program is the easiest way to do it. This is a program that records whatever is on the screen. Some snipping programs can only make videos while others can produce both video and GIF files.

There are many programs available, like the snipping tool from GetCloudApp. This can one produce both types of files and the process of recording the GIF is easy.

All you have to do is set a recording area, set the video file there and record the section that you want to turn into a GIF.

Things to Remember

Recording a GIF is easy, but there are a few things that you should remember when doing it. There is technically no limit to how long a GIF can be. If you have enough memory, then you can turn a whole movie into a GIF. The problem is that this would require a massive amount of memory on your hard drive, and it would be almost impossible to upload.

Most GIFs are around two to six seconds long but there are many around 30 to 60 seconds long. Going beyond this length is possible but not recommended.

Another thing to consider is whether or not you want to include sound. GIFs are capable of playing audio data but you’ll notice that most GIFs online are silent. In fact, it’s considered good manners to warn people when GIFs have audio. It’s a personal choice as to whether or not you think the GIF should have sound, but silent ones are more common.

The last thing to consider is quality. You can often change the quality of the GIF itself. This is a balancing act between the clarity of the file and how much memory is required to download and watch the GIF.

Conclusion

There are many ways to create a GIF file from a video with a snippet program being the easiest. Not only are these programs simple to easy, but they are very accurate and allow you to easily select which portion of the video that you want to turn into a GIF.