Video to GIF

Clip and convert together

Most of the time you do not want the whole video as a GIF, you want four seconds of it. Set the start time in minutes and seconds and drag the duration slider to how long the GIF should run, up to 30 seconds. That saves the usual two-step dance of trimming somewhere else and then converting.

Keep it short. Ten seconds is the sensible ceiling and five is a good default — not for any technical limit, but because of what GIF does to file size.

Why GIFs get so big, and how to control it

GIF stores every frame as a separate image with no compression between frames, which is why a clip that is 2MB as an MP4 can be 20MB as a GIF. Three settings control that, in order of how much difference they make.

Length matters most — file size scales almost directly with it, so halving the duration roughly halves the file. Width is next: dropping from 480 to 320 pixels removes more than half the pixels in every frame. Frame rate is last, and the one to touch least; 10fps is the default and looks fine for most motion, while 5fps saves space and starts to look choppy on anything moving quickly.

If a GIF is too large, shorten it before you shrink it. A tight three-second clip at 480 pixels beats a ten-second one at 240 in both size and how it looks.

The quality difference is in the palette

A GIF can only contain 256 colours. A one-pass conversion picks them from a fixed generic palette, which is why so many converted GIFs have banded skies, grey-looking skin and muddy gradients.

This runs two passes instead: the first analyses your actual footage and builds a palette from the colours it contains, the second re-renders the clip using that palette with high-quality scaling. The same source comes out visibly cleaner, and the difference is largest on faces and screen recordings — which is most of what people turn into GIFs.

Looping

Forever is the default and what people expect from a GIF. Once is right when the clip has a definite ending you want to land on rather than restart — a result appearing, a punchline. Three times sits in between, useful for a short demonstration you want repeated but not endlessly.

Related tools

Trim Video is worth using first if you need frame-exact control over where the clip starts, since this tool cuts from a typed time. Video Compressor shrinks the source video instead when what you actually need is a smaller MP4, and Video Converter handles other format conversions.