Video to GIF
Turn a slice of video into a looping GIF or an animated WebP. Frame rate, width and length are yours to tune, and a generated palette keeps the colours from banding.
MP4 · MOV · MKV · WebM · AVI — short clips work best for GIF
Accepts plain seconds (3.5) or a clock value (0:03.5). GIF gets
large fast — 5–10 seconds at 480 px is the sweet spot.
Why GIFs look bad, and how to avoid it
GIF has a fixed palette of 256 colours per frame. Hand it a normal video and the encoder has to approximate everything else, which is what produces the banded skies, blotchy skin tones and speckled gradients that make most video GIFs look cheap. The fix is not a filter — it is generating a palette that matches your footage before encoding.
This tool does that in a single pass: the frame stream is split, one branch compiles an optimal 256-colour palette from the actual frames, and the other branch encodes using it. Dithering then trades noise for smoothness — Bayer applies a regular pattern that compresses well, Sierra produces smoother gradients at the cost of a larger file, and none leaves flat bands that are very small and very obviously banded.
GIF or animated WebP?
Animated WebP supports full 24-bit colour and real transparency, so it usually comes out both smaller and noticeably cleaner than the same clip as a GIF. The catch is compatibility: every current browser handles it, but chat clients, presentation software and social platforms are inconsistent — some simply show a static first frame. GIF is the safe choice when the file has to work everywhere; WebP is the better file when it only has to work in a browser.
Size scales with width, frame rate and duration, multiplied together. Halving the width cuts the pixel count to a quarter; dropping from 20 to 10 fps halves the frame count. If the result is still too big, shorten it first — a tight three-second loop almost always conveys more than a rambling ten-second one.
FAQ
What is the maximum length?
There is no hard limit, but GIF size grows linearly with length. Beyond about fifteen seconds, sharing the original video is almost always the better idea.
Can I add text or a caption?
Not in this version — it converts frames as they are. Trim to the moment you want first with the trimmer.
Will the GIF keep the audio?
No. The GIF and WebP formats have no audio track, so sound is dropped by design.