When posting video asking for help.

[knightsb]

There are several on the board who can make animated gifs from youtube or vimeo video posted.

IMO, the animated gifs are often times superior to a linked or embeded video.

I know slowing things down helps in video analysis, however when you only post the video in slow motion, it makes it much more difficult to create an animated gif that are a reasonable size.

I prefer the video post at regular speed anyway becasue I normally download the video and step through it a frame at a time using quick time player.

For those that generate the animated gifs, do you find the slow-motion video more difficult to work with?

 

[Perfect Circle]

JMHO... I prefer real time clips.

 

[JJsqueeze]

I prefer real time video as well, then I can slow it down and go frame by frame, make a gif etc. When someone posts just a gif then you never know if there are missing frames from the conversion process.

 

[martianr]

What is the best (and free) way to make a GIF? I have no clue. I posted my first video on here in the "Softball Hitting Technical" form called "Batting Technique". Would you look at it and tell me if its ok? Is there something else I need to do or know. JMHO I wish there was an easier way of putting in videos.

 

[knightsb]

What is the best (and free) way to make a GIF? I have no clue. I posted my first video on here in the "Softball Hitting Technical" form called "Batting Technique". Would you look at it and tell me if its ok? Is there something else I need to do or know. JMHO I wish there was an easier way of putting in videos.

From Noontime. The post is at BBD here, but you have to be a member:

Well they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so a good GIF must be worth about 80,000 words....

I recently took the time to get set up and figure this GIF making thing out. There may be some interest out there in doing the same so I thought I'd share.

Here is what I do:

1) I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser and there is a free plugin for it called Downloadhelper available here:
DownloadHelper - Media download Firefox extension

This is the program that lets you take the clips from MLB.com or YouTube (or other sites) and save them locally to your computer as .mp4 files that are viewable in Quicktime.

So even just this step here is cool because now you can at least save your favorite clips locally on your machine and open the clips in Quicktime to look at stuff frame by frame, etc.

2) By upgrading to Quicktime PRO you can trim the full clips to just the segments you are interested in and save them and export them as .avi files.

3) To make the actual GIF from the .avi file, I use a program called Ulead GIF Animator available here:
download.cnet.com/Ulead-GIF-Animator/3000-2186_4-10002057.html

This software has a 15 day free trial to get the hang of it and see if you like it. After my 15 day free trial expired I tried some other free programs to convert the .avi to a .gif but they were not as good as ULead and I ended up just buying Ulead (I think it was $30 or so). There is a learning curve with this program, especially when you get into trying to merge side by side clips etc but for simple animated .gif creation from an .avi file it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

4) I upload the .gif to my account at photobucket where I can then link to it from here.

Voila... GIF frenzy! MLB.com is a great site for source clips, it is just a matter of plowing through them to find the right shot/angle.

If you take the plunge and get set up, feel free to ask me questions.

Again, this was just the path I took. If anyone has good success with other programs please share.

Cheers,
NoonTime

My problem is finding a copy of Ulead without risking getting a buch of malware. If anyone has a link or copy of ulead w/o the malware, I'd be interested.