Gleeky

Gif Tutorial

Since I get asked about how to make these on a very regular basis, I thought I’d try to put together a tutorial. This is a pretty comprehensive look at it, but I expect some of you might still have questions. Because this is basically non-Glee related and I don’t want to clutter up everyone’s dashboards, please send gif questions to my personal tumblr, instead of here!

Let me also clarify that there are many ways of making gifs, and lots of people use different programs than I do (Photoshop seems to be a common choice). My method uses only programs that are free and easy to download.

The first thing you need to do is select the segment of video that you want to make a gif of. I do this using Windows Movie Maker, which should be on your computer already, unless you’re a non-Windows user.

Typical length for a gif is around 2-4 seconds. I wouldn’t try to go longer than 5 or 6, just because your gif will come out really jumpy and weird-looking. But you can play around with it as you like.

Isolate the clip you want to use. In this example I’m making a gif of Quinn smiling in ‘Prom Queen’.

Then publish your movie.
You now need a program to take stills from your movie clip. The one that I use is a free video to jpg converter, which can be downloaded here.

Once you’ve opened it up, it’s very easy to use.

Just select the video clip you want at the top, and specify how many JPGs you want. I usually try for around 15-20, depending on the length of the clip. Under ‘output folder’, choose where you want to save the JPGs. Then click ‘extract’.
The last program you need is something to put the actual gif together. As I said before, there are lots of options for this, but I use a free program called Photoscape (download here).
Optional step: you may want to edit the stills before you make your gif. There are a few reasons for doing this - a) if you want to put a watermark on your gif; b) if you want to mess around with the colouring or lighting; c) if you want to crop the photos to a certain shape or size; d) if you want to add an object to your photo (like this); etc. All of these things can be done in the batch editor, where you edit multiple photos at the same time.

Drag and drop your photos into the editor.

The red arrow points to the list of photos that I’m editing - all the JPGs that my converter program created. I’ve also added a watermark by creating a text object on the right toolbar; you can see it on the left edge of the picture.

I’ve also made some adjustments to the lighting of the pictures, using the options in the right toolbar. You can fiddle around with this to find your preference. Once you have the JPGs looking the way you want them to, click ‘Convert All’.
Now, switch over to the ‘Animated Gif’ tab.

Drag and drop your converted JPGs into the gif editor.

Now comes the tricky part - determining what size and speed to make your gif. The speed is basically up to you; it won’t affect the file size much, and is easy to change (just click ‘change time’ on the right toolbar). Just play around with it until the speed looks right to you. I usually find that somewhere between .10 and .20 seconds is about right.

Size is a little more difficult to negotiate. In order to upload to Tumblr, your gif needs to be no larger than 500x500. You can see on the right toolbar (above) that mine is currently 500x250.

However, Tumblr also requires that your gif be smaller than 500 KB. When I try to save this gif, it comes out too large.

To shrink your gif, you can either adjust the physical size (ie. I could make it 500x200, or 400x250, etc.), or you can remove one or more of the frames, making your gif slightly shorter.

I’ve chosen to use a combination of these, by deleting the first three frames and changing the size to 500x230.
My gif is now under 500 KB and can be uploaded to Tumblr!