zoom zoom, live in the moment

Hey guys, you wanted one, so I came up with one :)

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There are 3 things which are very important for high quality gifs.

1. The download

2. The sharpening

3. The coloring

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1. Let’s start with the download.

I prefer torrents, because they are fast and they have almost every anime. Basically I download them here. Just type in the name of the anime you’d like to gif. It will show you a long list with different downloads. Every link which are offering you 360p or 480p downloads.. you can push them aside. Search for the ones with 720p quality or better 1080p. I know it may took long, up to 2 days to download them, but it’s worth! It’s such a pain to gif with low quality frames, because it looks so weird and they’re not as good as the high quality ones.

Hi! there are a lot of steps in making gifs so it’s kind of hard (and it’d take me a while to compile a list of what I do), and it also depends on what kind of computer you have.

First look at this tutorial. That’s where I started, and from there I branched off. I’ll quickly note what I do that is different.

1. Since I have a mac, I can’t obtain KMplayer. VLC is also glitchy as hell for me, so in order to get the frames I first must open the video in vlc, use quicktime to take a screen video of the section I want, and then open up Gif Brewery (I paid $5 for this program. It’s an easier way to make gifs, but you ultimately get less control) to time the segment I want, and then to export as frames to separate folders. Use 12 frames per second because most animations are 24fps. If you can bypass this with KMplayer or your VLC is cool, you’re lucky ;;

2. Since I have a mac and Gif Brewery doesn’t allow you to choose how the exported frames are named, I made an automater script to rename all the files in a folder chronologically by 3 digit numbers (001, 002, etc). This ensures that they load in photoshop properly, because otherwise photoshop will load 0, 1, 10, 11 - 19, 2, 20…. what a pain.

3. The sharpening actions offered in the link I found were too strong. The first link I believe is broken, and the second one likely works better for real-people as opposed to animation. Therefore, I made my own action in photoshop to sharpen the correct amount. Even then, sometimes when you’re dealing with 250px gifs the sharpening can be too strong. This is especially true when you’re dealing with Cardcaptor Sakura, so when I want 250px I resize the image to 400px, run the sharpening action, and then further downsize to 250px.

4. Since I work with animation, I delete the frames I don’t need. Instead of retiming every frame to be 0.13secs as the tutorial suggests, I leave all my frames at 0sec, and then when there is a repeat frame (literally nothing changes), I delete one and change the other to 0.13secs. This makes the motion much more fluid and saves on photoshop space. I cut out talking frames that aren’t necessary, etc. It’s a hard process because sometimes you can make things too fast — I’m still learning how to best to do this.

General Tips —

1. Realize that pans are the most intensive because the most pixels change per every frame. Be wary if you are going to gif any pans.

2. In terms of syncing a set of gifs of similar motions (Doremi for example) I first load all the frames of the first gif. For example, my folders will be saved as DoremiMotto1, DoremiMotto2, AikoMotto1, AikoMotto2, etc. So I load all the 1s first, and view the total amount of frames. Then I write down which frames are the most important motions they all share (the claps, for example, which must happen on the same frame). So let’s say Doremi claps at frame 7, Aiko claps at frame 9, and Hadzuki claps at frame 11. I view each set of frames and see how to match Aiko and Hadzuki to 7 frames so that the claps are together. Then I move onto the next checkpoint, and rematch everyone. Doing it like this saves a lot of effort, as opposed to how I used to do it (make one person’s, then try to match the second person’s to the first. DON’T DO THIS! It wastes time and the transformations are not similar enough).

3. Your gif must be under 2mb. You’ll come up with a lot of tricks you need to reach this. Typically, vibrance/saturation are the first step. I set vibrance to 40 and saturation to 10. Some people set saturation much higher, which I personally think looks ugly (but I know why they do it, it saves on space). Making the contrast higher, making the gif brighter, will all take more space. Be aware of this if you want to make pastel-gifs. After that, I sometimes use color balance, but that doesn’t always help necessarily. Selective color is also useful. If the gif is not super light, you can sometimes make a small black gradient from the top and the bottom and lower the opacity of the gradient layer to save on space. If you know how to clone stamp, you can just remove details from the background to save on space. Delete all frames you don’t need. Feel free to omit an entire sequence (such as other people gasping) because it’s not necessary. Delete all repeat frames and retime. See which frames you can just straight out delete without consequence. ETC.

4. Realize that photoshop plays the gif preview slower than the actual. So save it for web, then open up your gif to really get an accurate feel for the timing.

5. An animation video that is 4:3 in dimension (Cardcaptor Sakura, Princess Tutu) will take much more space than something like Princess Precure, which is 16:9. Typically for a 500px CCS gif, 19 frames is ideal, but I often try my best to stretch it to 25 frames (often by cutting pixels from the top and bottom). It doesn’t always work out. Princess Precure can often fit around 40 frames for a 500px.

Hey there! I wrote this a year ago, but I’ll talk a bit about the automation processes I use!First off, since after grabbing the frames, the numbers I get (since I have to use an external program other than having it built into the video player) go in order of 1, 2 …. 10. because they are not preceded by a 0, like 01, this means photoshop will load them as 1, 10 … 19, 2, 20. reordering by hand is a pain, so I made an automator function to rename everything by placing 00 in front of it. Here’s what that looks like:

Now if you have a nice video program that grabs the frames for you, you won’t have to do that! So let’s talk about what I do in photoshop. I have 2 automated processes: setting up the gifs, and then sharpening. Since I mentioned before that the sharpening given by the link was too strong, I simply remade mine to apply sharpen. This works much better for animation, while the super-sharpen works better for people, I think (I haven’t exactly tried gif’ing people before).

So here’s what it looks like:

After I’ve batch loaded all the frames into the program (takes forever!!), I hit “Play”, and then “Sharpen”. Ignore Default Actions, I’ve never used that in my life so whatever photoshop, lol.

The action I’ve called “Play” saves me from all of those individual steps! What it does is it makes a frame animation, automatically set it to loop for “forever”, and then it sets up a vibrance layer (I dislike super-saturated gifs and so I use Vibrance 40 + Saturation 10) on top of all the layers. Then it selects the very first layer, and the very first frame. This is important because sharpening requires that the layer & the frame be selected by the mouse at the same time (TALK ABOUT TEDIOUS).

So since I’ve automated it to already select them, I can go right to step 2 and hit “play” on that sharpen!

Sharpen is really long and it’s never supposed to “complete” (if it does, it didn’t reach the ending frames). So it’ll always run out of frames, and I’ll hit “cancel” once it hits the last one. If you keep clicking continue, you’ll find that your last frame ends up more and more sharpened, which is the opposite of what you want to do. My current sharpen function goes to 320 possible frames, because that’s the longest I’ve ever loaded into photoshop. 

Anyway, after that I do all my retiming stuff I talked about before. This is because I love fluidity and double frames eat unnecessary space (they are the enemy!). Nowadays I’ve also realized that if an animation is using full frames (such as LWA), I can also set it 0.08 per frame for maximum fluidity. If I think it goes too fast to appreciate though I’ll probably leave it at 0.1

Gif-making is real tedious, huh. Well usually I also mess with levels to see if it’s bright enough, etc, but you can skip that step b/c it’s not that important. The last thing that affects HQ is probably the “save for web” options, so here’s mine.

2-Up helps you compare the colors (there will be inevitable color-loss in limiting to 256, which is the highest). Photoshop tells you how large the gif will be at the bottom left, and then has useless timing stuff that is never accurate (?). Anyway, the important parts are to hit “Pattern” and “Adaptive” (”Selective” or “Perceptual” work but my preference is for “adaptive”). And Bicubic, I guess? I saved these options as a template so I don’t forget! 

But yeah, that’s what I do! Lemme know if you have more questions! Good luck!