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I am an absolute newbie so I don't really understand command prompt.

I have downloaded gimp-gap (Is that the best one to use?).

I want to make an animated gif from frames of a movie.

I have a series of frames in .png that I took from a dvd using vlc video capture.

but then what do I do?

I have opened gimp, clicked file-open as layers then selected the files.

They appear to load in but then just one huge image comes up in gimp.

I have no idea what to do...

Not even sure if that was the correct first step!

Aaargh! Am so confused. I have been searching web for hours but can only seem to find instruction for windows and photoshop or something.

Am nearly in tears please help if you can. Thank you.

Carla
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  • are you talking about an animated GIF? http://askubuntu.com/questions/107726/how-to-create-animated-gif-images-of-a-screencast or are you trying to create a GIF from one particular frame in a movie? – fossfreedom May 28 '12 at 06:16
  • Yes yes. But not of a screencast, of a series of frames from a movie that I want to create into an animated gif. Thanks – Carla May 28 '12 at 06:18
  • Oh, forgot to say I took my frames from a dvd using vlc video capture, they are .png. Not even sure if that was the correct first step. Aaargh! Am so confused. – Carla May 28 '12 at 06:21
  • Edit all of that stuff into your question - make it clear you have lots of .png files - it sounds like you are trying to sequence the png files together before converting into an animated GIF. – fossfreedom May 28 '12 at 06:24
  • Hope that makes more sense? Thanks fossfreedom – Carla May 28 '12 at 06:30

2 Answers2

2

You can navigate to this question

First command above create sequence of images. Second command puts images into on gif-file:

ffmpeg -i video.avi -t 10 out%02d.gif
gifsicle --delay=10 --loop *.gif > anim.gif

Also, you can use optimization level flag --optimize=03. It can be helpful to reduce file size:

gifsicle --delay=10 --optimize=03 --loop *.gif > anim.gif

Additionally, you can manipulate with number of colors --colors num of current palette and --color-method method to determine most appropriate palette.

As for me most appropriate method is median-cut 

median-cut is the median cut algorithm described by Heckbert

Also, I try to manipulate with described flags and found most useful options to achieve better quality of generated gif-image:

gifsicle --delay=3 --optimize=03 --color-method median-cut --loop *.gif > anim.gif

Be accurate with --delay=NUM to correspond animation speed . This param depends on FPS of original video.

Community
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Alexander Borodulya
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You don't need GIMP to merge several files into animation, you can do that with imagemagick. Have a go at http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_basics/

If your images have the same sizes just install imagemagick, open a terminal, got to the directory where the images are, and convert them:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick
cd ~/Images
convert -delay 100 *.png animation.gif

If you really need GIMP, then please read http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/

Arpad Horvath
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Alexandre Prokoudine
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