What website/software do you use to create your gifs? They're always such good quality.
hello! I’m so sorry for only getting round to answering this now, it’s been sitting in my inbox for months and since you sent it I’ve completely changed the platform I make my gifs on. I’m now using photoshop cc 2018 but the gifs you must have been referring to were made using completely different, free and accessible software/websites. There’s a lot of photoshop tutorials out there but less so for other options so I’ve decided to just go through my previous process in the hopes that someone will find it useful!
To be honest, the differences between my gifs BP (before photoshop) and AP (after photoshop) aren’t that huge as long as the video quality is good. It’s easier to add subtitles, to colour and to play around with the gif size/quality, but there’s no need to give your soul away to adobe to create good gifs there’s obviously always the possibility of downloading ps less legally which i of course would never in a million years do. So, to create gifs as I did BP you will need three different things:
a screen recorder (I use QuickTime Player which is preinstalled on a mac but there are many others out there, and then VLC player if I had already downloaded the video which didn’t happen often as I mostly gif matches so I’d just screen record parts of the match if I couldn’t download it)
a video editor (I used iMovie which again is preinstalled on macs but there are other options out there if you have a poke around - if necessary this step can also be skipped but it’s useful and will improve gif quality)
the lord and saviour ezgif.com (a free website at everyone’s fingertips which provides many of the features you can get with ps)
1A. Screen recording: have the part of the video you want to record on your screen, open up QuickTime Player, right click on the image of the app in your dock, then click on “new screen recording”. You can then click on the arrow pointing down to change your sound settings, I usually have mine like this
click on the circle with smaller red circle (play button) after which these instructions will appear across your screen: “click to record the full screen. Drag to record part of the screen. End recording by clicking the stop button in the bar menu”. So you can chose to record your full screen or just a part of it depending on whether you click or drag. If you drag you are then given the opportunity to adjust the area you want to record and then you press “start recording. Once you have finished recording the part you want to gif, click on the circle with a black square inside (stop button) in the menu bar at the top of your screen. Go to file > save and then save the video in whatever file and under whatever name you want. After this you will have finished step one!
1B. The alternative, if rather than screen recording a video you haven’t downloaded you want to record a certain part of an already downloaded video then you can use software such as VLC (you can also just upload the video directly to iMovie and crop it there but if it’s very long/you don’t want to go through the middle step then you may want to consider this as an option). Go to Finder for the video you’ve downloaded, right click on it then Open with > VLC. Find the part you wish to use for your gif, go to Playback > Record like so.
It will immediately start recording what’s playing, stopping when you click on Record again once the part you want to gif is over. Then step one method two is done!
2. iMovie: as ezgif isn’t the best for colouring, and anything that it does do is pretty slow and arduous, then I used iMovie to shorten, slow down and colour my videos before turning them into gifs. Here I go Create New > Movie > File > Import Media. I find the video(s) I want to use to make gifs, click import and then drag and drop them into the timeline.
Usually I try to make my gifs about 3 second long, so first thing I would do is change the speed from normal to about 70/80% (this is a completely individual choice though!) so these would be my current settings
Then I find the exact bits I want to gif and divide them into individual clips, as I said they’re usually 3 second long but it can vary. This is done by right clicking on the part of the video you want your gif to start and clicking on “Split Clip”, and again at the point you want your gif to end. Repeat for however many gifs you want. Simply delete the parts of the video(s) you don’t want to keep after this is done.
Now I attempt to add some colouring. First I go to “Colour Correction” which is in the same bar “Speed” is - it’s the little artist’s palette. I play around with the different toggles a little bit until I find something which I believe works. This honestly varies so much from gif to gif but usually I up the saturation just a lil bit, leave the temperature as it is and darken the video so that it ends up a bit like this but honestly it fluctuated a lot and it’s all about personal preference.
If I’m feeling funky I’ll also mess about with the “Colour Balance” which is under the first icon on the left which is a half white circle. I use the eye dropper to change the skin tone balance and sometimes the “White Balance” eye dropper which is a simplified version of ‘curves’ in photoshop.
Once you’re happy with how your video looks then save it by going to File > Share > File. Name it and, if possible save it in as high a quality as possible. My settings usually look something like this
click Next > Save and step two is finished!!
3. Actually making the gif using ezgif.com/video-to-gif. Go to “Choose Files” and select the video you want to gif, then click “Upload Video!”. Chose the time frame you want for your gif, the size (the x540 one which says for Tumblr is the one to use if you’re uploading them onto here), the frame rate (the more per second the better the quality but also the bigger the gif size). All of this is also very well explained by ezgif at the bottom of the page so I’d definitely recommend having a read through all that. Then click “Convert To GIF!”.
From here you can either ‘crop’ to make the gif a particular size or use other tools such as ‘effects’, ‘speed’ or ‘optimise’ if you didn’t use iMovie or want to make some further changes. I usually only use the ‘crop’ as iMovie won’t let you change the dimensions of the gif whilst here you can do that. However I mostly stay away from the other tools as I find them a bit clunky and annoying to use. Once you’re happy with the final product click “Save” and hey presto your gif has been downloaded and is ready to be used!!
I hope some/all of this helped and feel free to hmu with any questions you might have if anything isn't explained that well. It took me ages to write this because I'm never sure whether these explanations make sense outside of the realms of my brain :)))
So I got a request to do a follow up on my initial ezgif/imovie gif tutorial focusing on how I added subtitles to my gifs so here we go!
I’ll start off by saying that this is one of the main features which photoshop really helps with - their quality is much better and it’s just easier to do especially for gifsets. However, this really isn’t to say you can’t have very decent subtitled gifs without it :)) So for this specific tutorial all you’ll need is iMovie and to go to the ezgif website to convert your subtitled video into the gif, for all other steps see the tutorial I linked above!
Okay so I’ve got this as my starting point where I’ve already coloured, slowed down and cut out the part of the video I want to gif (note: these steps apply for when you want to make multiple subtitled gifs from the same video, you’d just repeat the process outlined here)
To add the subtitles I change from “my media” to titles and then select the lower third option which I click and drag to where I want to add it in on my video. So now my screen looks like this:
It automatically will only be 4 seconds long, but you can elongate it by dragging the purple rectangle along your video until where you want it to end. Click on the textboxes which say Name and Description and start writing your text
Usually, I just delete the top bit which is in a bigger size (unfortunately this isn’t something which you can manually change) and type in my text in the bottom one. However, if the text you want to include is longer and you need to use both boxes, make sure that most of your text goes in the upper box so that the font size becomes smaller. You can keep an eye on this and can try and make sure that both boxes contain text of a similar size. Although this can’t be changed, you do have a range of options for different fonts which you can experiment with, plus the colour of the text can also be changed. So, for example:
Here I have kept the font the same but you can use the drop down box on the far left to change it. The size you cannot change but I’ve played around with the sentence to make it be almost equal in box text boxes, this is really just about trial and error. Then I’ve decided to make the font bold, italicise it and outline it (the three boxes on the right are in the order that I mentioned them) purely for stylistic reasons. Then if you click on the square which will initially be white you can change the colour of the text, although you can only change the colour of the whole text box rather than individual words in one. This is usually used to represent different people speaking.
Once this is done you’re basically ready to save the video and go and gif it using ezgifs. However, one last thing to note is the fact that in iMovie the subtitles fade in so if you gif all the part you’ve subtitled then there will be parts of the gif with captions still fading in. To get round this problem, I extend the subtitles to a little before and a little after I want the gif to begin and end. In this way on ezgif I can choose the starting point to be once the subtitles are fully on the screen, and same with the ending. And there you should have it, something like this as your final product :) Feel free to ask me anything if you would like more clarifications but I hope this helped for the time being
