I used to teach a program on making reaction gifs from youtube videos using
GIMP. This was years ago before the rise of various simpler apps, and was
my way of trying to sneak the basics of photo editing to a bunch of teens.
(That's also my argument for using GIMP instead of a simple app.) But I'd
also like to second Kate's point about not having instructional material
presented in a .gif format. Most "gifs" on the internet nowadays are
actually .webm's, which are full-fledged video files that can be paused and
scanned and as a bonus they have much, much, better compression and
quality. I think that's what Giphy uses as well at least on their main
site, their third party app integration might be different.

IIRC my process was:
- Using the import option, GIMP will take a video clip and break the frames
into layers.
- You can make any changes to the layers you want, such as adding text or
drawing shapes and objects. The best way to edit I found is to hide all the
layers with the eye icon and only ever view one layer at a time.
- Export the project as a .gif. In the dialog box somewhere there's a
checkbox that says something along the lines of "Save as animation" and
another that says "Loop forever." Both should be checked.
- There's also an option to set the number of frames per second, which
should match the framerate of the original clip. Unlike Photoshop it's a
constant value, so you can't have frames that last twice as long as other
frames without duplicating the layers 20 or 30 times.

Anyway, I loved this program, but it's super labor intensive for a 6-second
reaction gif, and it was never actually very popular with patrons.


On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 4:59 PM Joe Hourclé <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> > On Aug 31, 2020, at 3:36 PM, Lawrence Olliffe <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hey,
> >
> > There are several online converters, that can sometimes do better jobs,
> depending on how you configure their settings.
> >
> > If you'd rather do them yourself, and have different controls, or
> particularly if you want to script multiple conversions, here are two
> methods that I've used.  If anyone has improvements to add to these, I'd
> appreciate hearing them.
> >
> > Method #1 first converts the video to individual frames, and then
> constructs the frames into a gif.
> > Method #2 is a more direct conversion, however first generates a more
> focused palette, resulting in a smaller file size, than when using all
> available colours.
>
>
> And if you’re really anal retentive about file size, then you slice up the
> images so only the parts that are changing are kept in the subsequent
> frames and they just get placed on top of the existing image rendered so far
>
> I seem to recall the ability to define the time between each frame as
> well, so you could have it wait extra long on some frames without having to
> just repeat it
>
> As for what tools to actually use to do it, I have no clues these days.  I
> haven’t had to do much graphics work since the days when we had to worry
> about people still on dial up and without JavaScript support, so most
> people were still using Photoshop
>
> I did a quick dig through A List Apart to see if they had anything on
> animated gifs from the early days, but I guess that didn’t quite fit into
> their scope back then.  And I can’t remember what other websites I used to
> read, as a lot of the graphics stuff was still printed in dead tree
> magazines back in those days. (Adobe, Design Graphics, etc)
>
> -Joe



-- 
Andrew Ward (he/him/his)
Digital Services Librarian
Troy Public Library