Thread:Gilgameshkun/@comment-16581186-20151127151720/@comment-995426-20151127155452

First of all, I am morally opposed to helping anyone make 2K12 Mona Lisa GIFs. :P Though I may be able to blame some of the nausea on the possible s I've been having the past few days. (It's not been fun.)

However, speaking totally seriously now... I use a variety of tools:  Some of them recent, and some of them positively ancient. I'm also rather set in my file manipulation habits, so my setup may not be the most ideal.

I start with Avidemux, a video manipulation tool. I find the clip of a video I want, then export it as uncompressed as possible to .avi. Then I open that in VirtualDub, where I strip out audio, do some cropping, and export temporarily to a raw uncompressed .avi format. And the reason I go through using two separate video editing tools is because of my third tool&mdash;a very, very old copy of Jasc Animation Shop, made over a decade ago. This is where I import those uncompressed cropped silent video clips I exported from VirtualDub, and go through lots of tweaks. I try to make the GIFs (at least theoretically) Tumblr-friendly, keeping them below 500 pixels wide or tall and just below 2 megabytes in file size. The tweaks I use vary from picture to picture, where I may shrink to smaller dimensions (smaller than 500px wide), dither to a palette smaller than 255 colors (127, 63 or even 32&mdash;and in any event, always dithered by optimized median cut), completely or partially cull frame rate (from 24fps to 12fps, especially for slow motion segments), or even collapse identical or near-identical animation frames into one longer frame, and so forth. This involves a lot of trial and error, since my goal is to make the best GIF I can that will be just under 2 megabytes.

Now, because of my now dated and unorthodox choices of software, I don't really recommend you making GIFs this way. Surely there is much better software these days. Avidemux is still a very decent program, but VirtualDub has been showing its age, and there are certainly newer tools than super-old Jasc Animation Shop. If you find that better setup of programs (and they are all free programs), do let me know? :) I'm guessing that a more modern GIF-making program can accept some kind of output Avidemux can export, and Avidemux has its own cropping tools as it is, so VirtualDub may not even be necessary to such a process anymore.