Video to GIF Converter Pro

Why use this tool?

• Some chat apps, forums and email clients still show GIFs inline but not video, so a short loop is the format that works there.
• A GIF can hold only 256 colours, so a plain conversion often shows banding in skin tones and gradients; building the palette from your own footage avoids most of that.
• GIF files grow quickly with length and size; seeing the frame count in advance stops you from making a 40 MB file by accident.
• Screen recordings often come with dark borders around the window that waste width; they can be detected and cut off.

How to use Video to GIF

1. Drop a video onto the drop zone. Files up to 150 MB are accepted.
2. Set "Start at (seconds)" and "Length (seconds)". The length defaults to the first 6 seconds of the clip and can go up to 30.
3. Pick "Frames a second" (8 to 24) and a Width (240, 320, 480, 640 or the original). The Frames readout updates as you change them.
4. Choose whether to trim black bars, the Dithering style, the Palette mode (one for the clip, or new each frame) and Looping (forever or play once).
5. Press "Make the GIF". The first run downloads the encoder; then the GIF is built in two passes.
6. Check the loop in the preview, then press "Save the GIF".

Features

• Palette built from the clip's own colours rather than a fixed web palette
• Optional palette per frame for clips with big changes in light or scene
• Four dithering styles: Bayer, Sierra, Floyd-Steinberg or none
• Automatic black-bar detection and cropping before scaling
• Frame rates from 8 to 24 and widths from 240 pixels to the original
• Loop forever or play once
• Result panel with file size, frame count, width and bytes per frame
• Warnings when the clip is over 300 frames or the GIF is larger than 8 MB

Supported formats

Accepts MP4, WebM, MOV and MKV video up to 150 MB, with up to 30 seconds taken from it. Saves a GIF with the same name as the video.

Tips

• The defaults of 480 pixels, 12 frames a second and 6 seconds are chosen to give a file worth sharing. Change one setting at a time and watch the size.
• If the GIF is too large, reduce width first, then frames per second. The tool suggests 320 pixels or 8 fps when the file passes 8 MB.
• Use Bayer dithering for the smallest file, and Floyd-Steinberg when the clip has smooth gradients and size matters less.
• Turn off black-bar trimming if a dark edge is part of the shot, such as a night scene.
• For anything longer than a few seconds, a short MP4 is almost always smaller than a GIF of the same footage.

Frequently asked questions