Regarding gifs and video size

IYEL wrote on 4/25/2012, 7:33 AM

Greetings.

I recently a bought Vegas Movie Studio HD 11 and still trying to figure out many things about it.

I have been trying to create a forum avatar made by a .gif based on a bit of a film, I render the movie (around 10 secs) in .avi and then use an .avi to .gif converter. The problem is that the rendered movie is 60MB and around 500 frames.

I've been told that .gifs get heavier the more frames and the longer they are, but I do not know how to downsize the frames and/or the size of the movie.

Is it just because the bit of movie is 10 seconds long?
or should I render it in a different format?

Any help would be appreciated.

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 4/25/2012, 8:30 AM

Your GIF maker should have functions for:
1) Reducing the range of colors in your GIF; and
2) Reducing the number of frames in your animation.

Those are the two ways you make a GIF smaller. Well, that and the size of the image and length of the animation loop, of course. This is why photo or video images usually dont' make the best GIFs. They need too many colors in order to look natural.

GIFs are, by nature, usually only the size of a thumbnail, short (less than 5 seconds long) and rarely include as many as 12 frames per second.

richard-amirault wrote on 4/29/2012, 7:37 AM

I make my gifs with Photoshop (Elements, not Pro)

I make a series of still images from my video timeline advancing x amount of frames between images (depends on the action and the length of the time the gif will be)

Using EVERY frame will give you a much better, smoother gif .. but it will be huge. Skipping frames gives a more jerky action, but it still conveys what you want.

Byron K wrote on 4/29/2012, 2:55 PM

You can also drop the .avi into VMS and render out to .png or .jpg sequence which may be much smaller than .gif sequence.