Animated GIFs

[Mirai Gen]

What's a good program? Preferably something free, I don't like to pirate if I can avoid it.

(Lies)

[Melfice]

I remember the GIMP being pretty good at it.
Linkage (http://www.gimp.org/)

I'm not sure on this one, but I think you need to download an extra application for it though. But I may be very wrong about that.

[Mike McC]

The Gimp is very good at it, and can do it out of the box (so to speak). Very good scripts built in to optimize animated gif sizes. If you know how to use layers, you can make animated gifs. Just put each frame on a new layer, and amend the layer title with "(x ms)", where x is the number of milliseconds you want that frame to run for. Be sure to chose to save as an animation when saving it in gif format.

It's how I made my current avatar, and got it under the 19.5 kB.

[Mirai Gen]

What about video clips-to-GIF? I figure it would be easier than screenshotting.

This'll still serve the purpose, though.

[phil_]

The gimp can't do that, as far as I know.

Wait, maybe it can. (http://carol.gimp.org/gimp2/animation/gap/extract/) Look into that. Let us know if it works, since I might want it, too.

[Eldezar]

It can, but when I tried it it required too much work than I wanted to put into it. It is most likely much simpler than how I was going about it (not going to bother explaining because I not only don't remember, but it was hard and tedious), but I was definitely able to put little video clips in my GIMP.

[Mike McC]

What about video clips-to-GIF? I figure it would be easier than screenshotting.

This'll still serve the purpose, though.For that, I recommend VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/), a pretty useful video editing/converting freeware program. Just select/highlight the part you wanna capture, and go to File -> Export -> Animated Gif. Works pretty well.

Then do some post processing /tweaking in The Gimp (removing unnecesary frames, optimizing, and so on).

I tested out this capability in VirtualDub, and edited in The Gimp, to make this thing (unfortunately still too large in filesize for an avatar):

http://s182.photobucket.com/albums/x275/fencershinryuu/controlstheuniverse.gif

The Gimp also makes it easy to crop animated gifs down to a specific area, it's really rather nice for animated gifs.

[phil_]

Aw, boo, I can't use VirtualDub. Not without some more pirating, anyway...

Edit: The results look good, though.

[Bells]

What about video clips-to-GIF? I figure it would be easier than screenshotting.

This'll still serve the purpose, though.

Oh man... just a few days agora i had this freeware that converted Avi videos to GIF; i THINK it's name was "Avi to Gif", but you should look it up, it worked just fine