There are a variety of ways to make animated gifs from video files. I only truely know one or two ways.
This is how I do it.
First, you need two programs. Virtual Dub and Adobe Photoshop (which comes with Adobe ImageReady).
Virtual Dub is free and you can get it HERE, while you have to "buy" photoshop.
Now, you take the video file that you want to make the gif from and open it in Virtual Dub. Then, use the slider and position it a little before the point where you want to start the gif. After that, click on the "Mark In" button which is the button on the left inside the red circle, if you look at the image below. Then move the slider to a little bit after the point in the video that you want to end the gif at and press the Mark Out button (the one on the right).
Now all you have to do is go to "File - Save Image Sequence ..." and set the destination for the images and set the file name prefix for them. What this will do is take the frames, from inside the selected area, and convert them into a bunch of jpeg files. So make sure you make a folder just for these files.
Once it's all done converting the images, close VirtualDub and open up the folder that you saved the images to. What you have to do is delete half of the files. The easy way to do this is to resize the folder if necessary to make the files appear in two vertical lines. Then highlight all the files on the right half and delete them. I do this to make the animation in the gif move at a relatively normal speed. If you had left them in, the gif would move rather sluggishly, plus it would double the size of the file.
Now you can finally open up ImageReady. In ImageReady, go to, 'File - Import - Folder as Frames ...' and select the folder that you had saved the images to. Now all that's left to do is to resize gif to whatever you want by going to "Image - Image Size ..." and save it. Make sure you select, "Save Opimized As ...". Saving normally, will not save the file as a gif.
Sometimes, when you save it, the file doesnt play fully. It may only go up to a certain frame and then stop. To rectify this, just slightly resize the image and save it again. That always works, though sometimes you have to resize a few times. An Voala, you have a perfectly retarded looking animated gif .... cuz it's your first time and you fucked up.
Easy way: There are some video files that you can open up directly in ImageReady. It only works for me when i open up .mov files. So if you can get that to work, it has a simple menu for making a selected segment of the video into an animated gif.
Happy Birthday Starnum!!
