Gif Animation Questions

[Johnnymushio]

ok, i used windows movie maker, now i have a 6 second wmv clip i would like to be a animated gif.

the thing is,, ok ill describe it this way. i want it to be played like this forever

1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 ... foreverrr. you see what imean?

what FREE program can do this, and i would also like it to be able to crop the picture to remove the black bars on the top and bottom.

[djr33]

animated gifs repeat none, a certain number of times, or infinitely, each way through the entire sequence of frames. No options there.
Just duplicate the frames (ie, 1234565432 as your animation) manually.

as for bars and such, I don't know why they are there, but you can probably adjust the dimensions of the project in WMM.

If not, search out any free/shareware gif animator. There are lots.

[Johnnymushio]

how would i repeat the frames? its a wmv

ive searched for hours, i cant find any programs.

the black bars are there because its a video

im also afraid the file size would be too big if i somehow managed to add the reversed video frames to the end of the original video. well guess it doesnt matter, how would i do that

[djr33]

Well, filesize would go up. but there's no way around it.

Look at download.com and search "gif". you'll find a lot. You don't need something complex for this.

[Johnnymushio]

searching for about 4 hours now today alone.

downloading so much crap onto my computer to try and find a way to do this.

ok.

- i have the 6 second long wmv

- i need to convert it to gif

- then, i need to crop the gif

- then, i need to reverse the gif

- then, i need to add the reversed gif to the end of the original.

- through this whole process, i need to keep the image quality.

you say i need nothing complex to do this...

[djr33]

You don't need anything more complex than a standard gif animator. Converting from wmv is a bit difficult, and I had misread your earlier post, that you had already done it. Sorry. But that won't be so hard.
If nothing else, a screen capture can do it.
6 seconds at the full framerate is either 6*30 or 6*25... approximately 175 frames. That's a LOT of data for a gif and not only will it be a very large file, but it'll probably stall on many computers.

Gifs are best at just a few frames, especially when you later want it to go in reverse.

For cropping, you should be able to fix this in windows movie maker. Change the settings, etc. If not, you can probably crop either frame by frame or through the whole animation with your gif animator.

It doesn't seem like you need anything special in terms of gifs here, so any gif animator should do.
http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0....t=gif&tag=srch
(any after the first are likely to work)

Once this is done, manually reverse the frames of the gif and duplicate. There's no real way around that unless you can do it in the first place from within windows movie maker (and you can, but i'm not sure exactly how as I don't like/use the program much, though I don't see that as difficult).

For image quality, that's just something you'll need to deal with. GIFs have a maximum of 256 colors and this gets progressively worse with each frame added, needing colors, so there is a lower allotment of new colors for every frame after the first.
GIFs are theoretically lossless, but that is just saying they don't lose any data in translation. But this IS limited to 256 colors which is a major loss of quality in itself. Be sure it's turned up (but higher filesize then as well), and you can also specify a particular palette (set of colors) and most program do this, so it should be able to get fairly close.

[Johnnymushio]

ive seen gifs that are high quality and last about 10 seconds, and are really big in size. they load nice on my pc...

And your right, it is about 150 frames.

well hmm im thinking about not reversing it...

the wmv is 320kb

im guessing when it is converted to gif it will get a lot bigger, right?

as for cropping, well i know i can resize the video, but i cant find a way to crop it. ive tried searching for about 30 minutes.

[djr33]

Large gifs tend to stall out. NOT the best method for delivering long animations. I've had old computers that stall and some even stall now on this computer (high end macbook pro). Think about visitors with old PCs.

wmv size has nothing to do with the gif. wmv is compressed. frame size, number of colors and frame rate will determine the gif's size. Much more than 320k, I'd expect, though, yes.

Reversing isn't possible as a setting, so that's up to you. Not resversing would certainly save a lot of space in the animation.

What are you trying to crop with?

Try zwei-stein, a free video editor from the company "thugs at bay".

[Johnnymushio]

hmm i might give up.

ive tried a ton of programs, i have to buy them all.

makes me mad, when i finally find one, make it perfect, then go to save , then it says i must buy the program to save it.

[djr33]

Some programs are free, or inexpensive.
I haven't needed one in a while, but look at the licenses on download.com and see which might work well. I'm sure you can find something.

the GIMP has an animated GIF program. GIMPshop? I forget what's it's called. Definitely free, though, but with a bit more of a learning curve.