#gooncam

[tenderloinfillet]

Eda Clawthorne gooncam, part 1

[kropotkindersurprise]

Hey there! Which program do you use to make the gifs? I would be pleased if you answer, have a good day! :)

Hey! I answered this a few times before, but I thought I’d add some tips this time. I use Gooncam: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gooncam/

This is gooncam and its’ buttons:

- Record: When you press the record button a resizable see-through window comes up. When you press Ctrl+alt+space this will record anything that inside that window. Make it the right size before you hit record, otherwise it will fuck up. I usually open a new instance of Gooncam every time I record, because it can give weird effects sometimes if you use it to record when theres already been frames recorded.

- Edit: When you’ve recorded you can see all the frames youve recorded in the edit window. You can delete all the unnecessary frames before and after the thing you wanted to record here.

- Settings: Only useful thing for me in this window is the Frames per second setting. I use 20 frames per second, which to me is a good medium between smooth gifs and small file size. Sometimes when I really want to gif something thats longer I put the FPS down to 10 but I try to avoid that.

- Converter: In the converter window you pick out the settings you want to use to make your recorded frames into a gif. 

The trick to making gifs for tumblr is to make them fit into the ridiculous file size limit of less than 2mb. You can achieve this here by changing these settings. If you press preview the converter starts making the gif, and it will show it playing when it is finished. If you hover over this gif it will show you the file size. If it says 2.00 Mb or larger the gif will not move when you upload it to tumblr.

The main options I use to control the file size of my gifs is using custom colour levels and changing the amount of levels. Lower is smaller file size but uglier gifs. 

Putting transparency optimization higher can help too, but can also make the gifs uglier. 

For gif size I usually aim at 400 pixels wide, but lower if the gifs file size is still too large. If your gif is 301 pixels wide or more it will stretch to fill the width of peoples blogs/dashboard. If it is 300pixels or less it will stay small and look weird and uncentered, so i try to at least make gifs 302 pixels wide.

If your gif is still larger than 2mb you can go back and delete some more frames, or decide to cut the gif up into multiple files, for example.

So, I hope this is a handy little starter guide for some of you wanting to make your own gifs. It at least explains a bit why I often split my gif posts up into multiple gifs, or why my gifs sometimes look kinda ugly, hah.

[kropotkindersurprise]

how do you make your gifs? which programm you use for it?

I use GoonCam