Thread: avi to gif for avatar

Seen a youtube video that would make a good avatar, well parts of it you can make into an avatar, the main problem being that a 1 minute video is around 3mb and an avatar limit for forums is around 100kb.

So first off find a video you like, you really only want to work with around 10 seconds of the video otherwise it starts turning into a major project, also you want the main subject nice and big in the video so it is nice and big in the avatar, if your using snaggit or similar video capture software then crop right into the subject area, start the capture and start the video selection.

This you now want to open with acdsee or photoshop or whatever you use, play the vid a couple of times to choose the area you want to take the frames from, select the area, select all frames, save as gif.

Now I got Steve Irwin here being chased by a stingray, if this was just reduced in size to say 150x150 nobody would know it was Steve or a stingray, on the left is a lot of wasted space, on the bottom is the person who originally created it, so all that lot can be cropped out.



Because I started with a animated gif I used snaggit to video it into an avi file, I then used acdsee to take out a small selection of frames from the avi and save them as gif, these were then resized so that they could fit into an avatar as you can see in the picture below, the avi, then 10 gifs 5 of which are the resiazed ones.



So here we have the 5 gifs I am going to use to make the animated one, would have been better to take about 30 and choose the best few, also at 8kb each they are still a bit too weighty so should be brought down a bit in quality to get more in.









Into banner maker they go, can use any banner maker or photoshop or whatever, see the red arrow, thats how long each one shows for, 150 is way too long for an animated gif for each gif to show.



And this is the gif, set at a speed of 50 it is still set too slow and with only 5, of which it seems 2 are very similar, but it can be used as an avatar, looks like the last one is still set to 150.