Does anyone in here know how to change a .avi into an animated .gif?

[Occulus]

I have a 200 frame .avi file that I'd like to turn into an animated gif. I tried the method explained (poorly) by the GIMP Wiki for using the GIMP to do this (I have 200 .png images that I imported as layers and tried to export as an animated .gif) but it's far too choppy, and changing the delay from 100ms to 40ms as recommended didn't do anything at all.

Does anyone know how to do this properly in the GIMP? Thanks in advance!

edit: I should have said, I have both a 200 frame .avi and each frame saved as a .png image. I'm willing to accomplish this with either the one or the other.

another edit: Here's the image. See how choppy and slow it is? That's what I want to fix.

[qnr]

1. it doesn't look /too/ choppy, but I can see how you'd like to touch it up

I just made a quick animated GIF from section of a tv episode downloaded from the Internet Archive.

I didn't do anything special to it to reduce the file size or anything, though I did change it to B&W and scaled it down to 200x120

First, I converted it to a .gif with mplayer:

$ mplayer atarist.avi -vo gif89a: output=file.gif:fps=30.0 -vf scale=200:120 -ss 15 -endpos 20 -saturation -100

(note that I put a space before "output" to avoid the smiley - you should remove that)

That gives me a five second clip starting at the 15 second mark of the .avi - the -saturation -100 made it black and white. The tv clip was full color, GIF only displays 256 colors, that's the reason I did this. As you have an already limited palette, you shouldn't have any problem.

I then loaded it into the Gimp and optimized it for Gif, and resaved it.

[Occulus]

2. Thanks! I'm assuming I can omit the scale switch if my .avi is already to scale?

And, if I want to start at the beginning of the .avi and end at the end, should I do a -ss 0 or and -endpos <whatever the end is>, or just remove them?

(I've never used mplayer to convert clips, only to play them.)

Also, I read in my searches for information about a linux utility called convert that's supposed to be able to do exactly what I'm trying to accomplish. Do you know anything about that?

edit: the original .avi I made is smooth as silk, as are the individual .png files when I play them back as an animation in blender. I don't know why the GIMP can't stitch the images together correctly...

[qnr]

3. right, they're all options. if it's the size you need you don't need to scale,

and I was just showing how to get a clip from a longer movie, you don't need either -ss or -endpos if you want the whole thing.

As far as the GIMP goes, it makes fine animations. My guess is that 40ms or whatever you used is slightly too long.

[Occulus]

4. That's the thing, I've tried changing the delay between frames when I export

and it does nothing at all. I read that I should be using the GIMP Animation Plugin (GAP), so I downloaded it, and although it adds a whole laundry list of options for animation work, it doesn't seem to help at all.

I should add, when I play the animation from within the GIMP, it plays at speed. It only slows down when I export to an animated .gif, and as I said, altering the delay between frames prior to export doesn't seem to accomplish anything. :shrug:

I'd really like to do it in the GIMP, because I'm lazy and I don't want to haul the whole thing over to my fedora account :D I guess I might not have any other options.

Being able to render directly to an animated gif would solve everything, but for some strange reason, that's not supported in blender. Maybe it'll be in version 2.50....

[qnr]

6. Actually, a dialog box should come up when you tell it to save as

a GIF animation. In that box, there will be something along the lines of Use <____> FPS for layers that don't have a time .... and then further down will be another one asking if you want to use that one to override all the layers, you'd say yes to that. That would be one quick way of changing the timing.

Edit: sounds like you say you tried that already and it didn't work.

[Occulus]

8. yeah- that setting has no effect, increased or decreased

which is very odd, because it's the standard, 'tutorialized' way of getting animations to play correctly.

I also tried it using .jpg images as the feedstock, and got the same- wrong- result.

[qnr]

7. Well, that mplayer line will convert it directly to an animated gif - but it

will be relatively large, which is why you're bringing it into the GIMP for optimization. It might also help to do two steps, first optimize for difference, and then optimize for GIF.

[qnr]

5. In reference to convert, you're probably thinking of the convert from the

imagemagick suite of tools. ImageMagick is exceptionally useful (others too, netpbm, for example). I'd say play with the mplayer/GIMP bit for a while and see what it can do for you, and then after you've accomplished what you want, explore the others. There are many fine tutorials online.

[Occulus]

9. I tried downloading imagemagick for windows

and all I got was a lousy image viewer.

Seriously. :D

However, if I can just 'yum imagemagick' and then 'convert ted.avi ted.gif' I'd be very very happy.

Nothing to lose- I'm gonna reboot and see what I can get done in linux.

[qnr]

10. OK, I wasn't paying close enough attention at first. I thought you were in Linux

until I saw your earlier Fedora comment. Give that mplayer bit a try in fedora, it should work fine for you.

[Occulus]

12. Well, here it is

Mplayer gave it a weird black line. I ran it through a filters -> animation -> optimize for GIF in GIMP before I uploaded it... is that what gave me the line, or did mplayer engage in some shenanigans?

edit: the color is a bit messed up, too.

[qnr]

11. thing about imagemagick is that it is a lot of little utilities that

you call individually. When you ran imagemagick it most likely fired up "display" - and you do get some options if you left or right click on an image, but it's certainly not the most efficient way of using it.

[Gman]

13. If you wanted that any smoother

you'd probably have to do a flash animation. The graphic is as smooth as you're going to get it as an animated gif, IHMO.

[Occulus]

14. It's exactly right in post #12, but for the background color and the black line on the right

I don't know why that happened, either, because the background is supposed to be stark white, and I didn't mess with the colors at all- at least, voluntarily.

(This should not be this hard; I see good, smooth animated gif images on the web all the time. I sure would like to know just what gives, here...)