Make Animated Gifs from Video | John Pratt: Digital Marketing and WordPress Consultant

If you’ve ever tried to make a short video clip for your website, you know how much of a pain this can be. I’m going to show you a method for making an animated gif form video today that’s easy, simple – and takes only a few minutes.

The web has been infatuated with motion ever since the first “blink” tag used in HTML to flash text off and on. Soon after the “animated gif” revolution began – and flashing blinking web pages were everywhere. With the advent of YouTube, we’ve been embedding videos into web pages for years now, and the use of animated gifs hasn’t been mainstream for most of the last 10-15 years. But now that we have high speed connections, many have been revisiting animated gifs for creating small segments of video in tiny clips.

When video clips were mainstream, many would spend hours painfully crafting them frame by frame in a graphics editor like Photoshop or Fireworks. Let me show you a much more painless way.

Enter GIFS.com:

Let’s say for a music blog I want a cool clip for a guitar article I’m writing. I go to YouTube and bring up some guitar fail videos. I find one with a little clip I like in a compilation here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVF_w5XvlLg

I not the minute and second in the video where the clips is. I paste the video URL into gifs.com, and once it processes – pick the start time:

I dragged the timeline (purple) window an addition second to the right to get the entire clip I wanted:

Then I clicked “create gif”, simple as that! There are a ton of editing features and filters that you can use to modify this video – you can even crop them, and add text and stickers. I’m going to leave this one just like it is. Once you’re done editing, you can get embed code for the video, or you can download the image and use it standalone. You could use the animated gifs within your website, but I can also see creating some really cool ones for social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn). Motion certainly picks up visitor eyeballs first, and all of those social platforms now natively show and support animated gifs.