Best way to turn animations into gifs?

drysider

Hey guys! So I'm having a problem and for some reason I am completely failing at finding out the best way to do this with google.

I've never turned my animation renders into gifs - just videos. Now that I'm trying to post my animations up on the net suddenly I've realised I have no idea what the best way to turn my renders into gifs is.

I've tried using photoshop but it slows down the gifs something fierce in-browner and i really don't want to muck around with a few hundred frames when all I want is to post some idles and turnarounds!

What do you guys use for making your gifs?

Bek

Photoshop can export gifs fine but you need to have adequate delay between frames (I had that exact problem before). Also the save for web option gives you more settings too for memory.

Eric Chadwick

GIF Movie Gear is awesome. Not free, but it does a really good job, loads AVIs and PSDs, lots of control for the palettization, good optimizer, etc.

If you already have Photoshop tho, that's certainly cheaper. Not as easy to use tho.

MrOneTwo

http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/

Pretty cool cmd line tool. Had problems with creating gifs with wildcard. Had to save file list into txt and then create gif from it. It needs some messing around but it's powerful and lightweight.

D4V1DC

If you render a movie out of your application say an avi, you can select enough frames within the avi on After Effects to export out an animation gif, if you need the bg transparent I'd render out tiffs and import those into, after effects or another application and do things that way.

Idles and turn around well then your already covered, if photoshop is slowing things down i think there is an option to control how fast said gif is seen, I forget where but found it through some google and youtubing.

ZacD

In photoshop, make sure the frame delay in photoshop is set to 0.06s, anything lower and it wont play at the right speed in the browser. There should be a way to change that pretty easily for all frames. .06s is about 17 FPS. So if you render out the animation at that speed, it will match.

MethodJ

Seconding what ZacD said. Make sure to test your final GIFs in multiple browsers and on multiple machines to ensure correct playback. I was a web designer for years, I remember wrestling with GIFs, trying to get them to play the same way on different configs.