Best Animated GIF Software?

[Sean Michael]

I want to create high quality animated GIF images, for use on the Web.

Ideally, I'd like to create them from edited short video clips.

It would be ideal if one could render output to the animated GIF format straight from Sony Vegas Pro. But... that's not possible.

I've looked for a quality software solution, and haven't yet found one. Anyone have ideas?

Below is a sample animated GIF (created with the IMGFLIP online engine) - but I want to create higher quality.

 

[David Jimerson]

Photoshop.

Word out there is that Beneton Movie GIF is a decent free app. Never tried it, though.

 

[Sean Michael]

Thanks. My copy of Photoshop is an older version (and it's Elements at that). I checked out Beneton and it doesn't seem to handle movie file imports. I was really hoping for a simple "drag & drop" video-to-GIF conversion software.

I just found another online engine (called bloggif) that seems to do a pretty good job converting videos to animated GIF, albeit with a 400 pixel width limit.

 

[Tom Shortridge]

Does it have to be .gif specifically for some reason? There's a great service - gfycat.com - that takes .gifs or videos up to 15 seconds and converts them into HTML5 videos that function like .gifs, but at a fraction of the filesize.

 

[wgtwo]

Yeah, .webm is a better option if possible. Premiere can output .gif, but you don't have any control over the compression which makes it completely useless.

 

[Sean Michael]

Thanks for the input. I need to bring myself up to speed on HTML5.

I tried gfycat and was pleased with the results - however, the output is hosted on the gfycat server. Ideally I'd like to host the output on my own server. Maybe there is a Wordpress plugin that will do the trick.

In the meantime, the bloggif engine is not a bad option.

 

[wgtwo]

There's a Premiere plugin for native .webm output.