re: Teach a man to Fish (Fark Board Beginner Questions)

What program do you guys for converting videos into pics to make gifs? I currently use AVS, but I think the amount of frames I use makes the GIF really slow. Any GIF I try to make in gimp from a video ends up lagging.

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great tips

not quite. What tool did you use?

Anybody else having problems with photobucket? Ever since the redo, I've had trouble uploading gifs. It automatically resizes them to very small and I can't figure out how to stop it.

It takes a few steps, but these free programs seem to work well for making gifs from youtube videos.

Free version of YTD video downloader will let you grab youtube videos and convert to .wmv

YTD Video downloader

Use Windows Live Movie Maker to slice up the video, and then "save movie" and I typically use the Zune HD (for device)setting which makes a nice size .wmv file

iWisoft free video converter does a good job of making .gif files from the .wmv file , you just have to play with the settings a bit.

Iwisoft Free Video Converter

There may be one tool to do all of this, but this is how I have been able to pull you tube clips, edit them, and make decent gifs with no logos, all with free software.

New tool I found called Virtualdub will take a Gif that doesn't have complete frames and save it as an avi file with complete frames. Then you can use Iwisoft to save back as a Gif and all frames are complete.
Virtualdub downloads

I remember my first photoshop









Nah, for real... I use color selector a lot and never noticed that. Thanks.

Also, someone told me that all human skin is the same hue no matter what. Do you know what it is?

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If you are experienced with Ps, then you won't really need to watch tutorials. If you find a gif you like, download it and then open with Ps. It will open with every frame as a layer. To start editing, click the "timeline" button. It looks like a film strip. This will turn the layers into an animated gif.

In the most basic example, if you wanted to add text to your gif, make a new text layer, highlight all frames in the TIMELINE window, and turn the layer visibility on in the layers window. This will put the text on every frame. If you wanted it to blink, put the visibility on every other frame, etc.

Now if you want something to move, you have to make as many copies of layers as frames that it will be moving in. Then just move each one gradually on each separate frame until it is smooth.

That part is as tedious as it sounds, which is why people use AE. you can make a layer one time and set keyframes to make them move across time. If its something that has to be exact to a point (replacing a face, pinning something to a point in space) it has really awesome features like camera and motion tracking.

AE is really complicated to learn, so I would recommend starting with Ps and working your way up.

When you save a gif in Ps, you have to choose "save for web"
If you start making in AE, you have to export as quicktime move, then open back up in Ps and repeat. If you go that route, make sure the video is not more than 15 frames per second, or it will play back very slowly.

Hope that gets you started, let me know if you have any questions.