horsehoesandhandgrenades asked:
gameraboy answered:
Sure! I have an out-of-date post here that goes into a lot of the basics.
Here’s a shorter, up-to-date rundown. I use GIF Brewery to make my GIFs. It’s $5 on the Mac App Store, so super cheap.
GIF Brewery needs mp4′s to work with, so if you have DVDs or other video sources in different file types grab Handbrake to convert to mp4.
Historically Tumblr only accepted GIFs 500px wide or less, but they’ve relaxed that restriction. Now the only hard limit is a 2MB per file. Anything over that will be converted to a horrible looking JPG.
GIFs can get large quickly, so a good GIF program will help you reduce the file size by reducing the frame rate and by dithering. So if a video is 24-30 frames per second, a good starting point for a GIF is 10 frames per second. I wouldn’t go below 8 frames per second.
Dithering is how you can compress an image from the millions of colors in the video file down to the 256 colors or less that a GIF can accommodate. What I like to do is start at 256 colors and work down from there. The more colors you have the better the image will look. There are also a lot of dithering algorithms you can use which can compress images differently. I prefer “Ordered”.
For example, these are my default preferences in GIF Brewery:
So, you’ve got a video clip ready to go, and GIF Brewery set with those default settings. Next up is to pick a clip. Most videos can only work from 1-3 seconds long as a GIF, so you’ll want to set your start and end points with that in mind.
Next you’ll want to think about how you want it to look. You can go the simple route and resize the width of your GIF to 500-600px and try to make the GIF, and see if it works. A more artistic way is to do a portrait aspect GIF, where you have it taller than wider. For those I usually set the video to 600px high, and then crop out 500-600px wide… or crop it the way I like it to look and then resize it down. Portrait GIFs look pretty sweet:
So you’ve picked a clip, picked an aspect ratio for it, exported it, and now it’s 4MB, twice what you wanted! Here’s the real art, how to condense it without making it look terrible.
The first thing you can try if you really like the crop and length is to adjust the colors down or the frame rate (or both!)
Click the little gear icon in the top right and you’ll get the GIF settings for this particular GIF. What you’ll want to try is to reduce the Color Count down to 128 or so (some cartoons as low as 96) and re-export. If you’re still too large try dropping the Frames Per Second down to 9, and then 8 if that still doesn’t fit under 2MB.
If you still can’t get it done, you’ll either have to redo the crop, resize the image down (again don’t go under 500px wide if you can help it, Tumblr will stretch smaller GIFs to 500px wide so it’ll make bad GIFs look worse) or go back and pick a smaller clip. Try going to your start and end points, use the arrow keys to advance a frame at a time and set an ever smaller GIF until you hit 2 MB.
That’s the basics, it takes a lot of trial and error to really get the feel for it. Good luck!
Almost one year in, it’s time for another update for Trump voters on his election promises:
1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more. You bought it. But his new tax law does the opposite. by 2027, according several nonpartisan analyses, the richest 1 percent will have got 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent of it. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.”
2. He promised to close “special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers,” especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law keeps the “carried interest” loophole.
3. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 23 million off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. The new tax law will result in 13 million people losing health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
4. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’ crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure.
5. He said he’d clean the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.
6. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced so many assistants (one of them hired and fired in a little more than a week) that people there barely know who’s in charge of what.
7. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals with drug companies. You bought it. But now the White House says that promise is “inoperative.”
8. He promised “a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still raising money for American elections.
9. He told you “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it. But he and House Speaker Paul Ryan are already planning such cuts in order to deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for corporations and the rich.
10. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money for this.
11. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he met with China’s president Xi Jinping and declared “China is not a currency manipulator.” Ever since then, Trump has been cozying up to Xi.
12. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it. But then he bombed Syria.
13. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border. You believed him. But there’s no money for that, either. Chief of staff John Kelly says it is “unlikely that we will build a wall, a physical barrier, from sea to shining sea.”
14. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.
15. He said he would not be a president who took vacations. “I would not be a president that takes time off,” he promised, and he called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief.” You bought it. But since becoming President he has spent nearly 25 percent of his days at one of his golf properties for some portion of the day, according to Golf News Network, at a cost to taxpayers of over $77 million. That’s already more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama cost in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.
16. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be “consequences” for companies that shipped jobs abroad. You believed him. But despite their promises, Carrier, Ford, GM, and the rest have continued to ship jobs to Mexico and China. Carrier (a division of United Technologies) has moved ahead with plans to send 1,000 jobs at its Indiana plant to Mexico. Notwithstanding, the federal government has rewarded United Technologies with 15 new contracts since Trump’s inauguration. Last year, Microsoft opened a new factory in Wilsonville, Oregon, that was supposed to herald a new era in domestic tech manufacturing. But in July, the company announced it was closing the plant. More than 100 workers and contractors will lose their jobs when production shifts to China. GE is sending jobs to Canada. IBM is sending them to Costa Rica, Egypt, Argentina, and Brazil. There have been no “consequences” for sending all these jobs overseas.
17. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and “bring back thousands” of lost mining jobs. You bought it. But coal jobs continue to disappear. Since Trump’s victory, at least 6 plants that relied on coal have closed or announced they will close. Another 40 are projected to close during the president’s four-year term. Utilities continue to switch to natural gas instead of coal.
18. He promised to protect steel workers. But according to the American Iron and Steel Institute, which tracks shipments, steel imports were 19.4 percent higher in the first 10 months of 2017 than in the same period last year. That import surge has hurt American steel workers, who were already struggling against a glut of cheap Chinese steel. For example, ArcelorMittal just announced it will soon lay off 150 of its 207 steel workers at its plant in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.
19. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But according to Mass Shooting Tracker, there have been 377 mass shootings so far this year, including 58 people killed and hundreds injured at a concert in Las Vegas, and 26 churchgoers killed and 20 injured at a church in Texas. Trump refuses to consider any gun controls.
20. He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,“ he promised during the campaign. He hasn’t released his taxes.
vortex chase
3-in-1 illusion gif !
illusion 1 : you may think there are some round particles in motion, but all of them are static, just growing up and down one at a time (mexican wave effect)
illusion 2 : you may think the first worm runs faster than the second one, and that they’re both accelerating, but they keep the same constant speed and distance in time and space all along (400m race bend effect)
illusion 3 : you may think there’s a third illusion but there’s not
It occurs to me that there are people who weren’t on this website in 2012 and therefore never saw the magical gif that you can actually hear:
It’s been over five years and that still impresses the hell out of me.
Oh my word
You can hear it
Epilepsy warning: don’t watch this gif.
Ditto migraine warning. And flash-blindness warning. And freaky psychedelic nightmares warning
“I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write.”
— Madeleine L’Engle (via quotemadness)
