Video to GIF Converter

Three choices decide almost all of a GIF’s size: how long the selection is, how wide the picture is and how many frames per second it stores. Quality, colours and dithering fine-tune the rest. Here is what every option in the converter does and what it costs.

A GIF grows with three things: the length of the selection, the pixels in each frame and the frames per second. At the default 480 px and 15 fps, a 5-second clip with average motion comes out at about 2.2 MB; at 320 px and 10 fps the same clip is about 677 KB.

Motion matters as much as resolution. ProMedia stores only the pixels that change from one frame to the next, so a screen recording with a still background can be a fraction of these numbers, while handheld footage, water or confetti can come out larger.

The GIF format itself has no length limit, but this converter stops at 2,400 frames, which is 2 min 40 s at the default 15 fps. In practice you will want much less: every extra second at 480 px and 15 fps adds roughly 443 KB, so a 30-second GIF is already too heavy for most chats and emails.

For clips longer than about ten seconds, or anything that needs sound, keep it as a video and trim the video instead.

Practically all of them. Formats your browser understands are decoded with WebCodecs, usually on the graphics chip, and older containers such as AVI, WMV and FLV are handed to FFmpeg, which the page loads the first time it is needed. If decoding fails part-way, the converter retries the same selection with FFmpeg on its own.

There are dedicated pages for MP4 to GIF, MOV to GIF for iPhone and Mac clips, and WebM to GIF for browser recordings. They run the same converter with tips for each format.

A GIF can never show more than 256 colours in one frame, so “high quality” means sharp, smooth and free of banding rather than video quality. These choices get you closest:

• Choose Best quality. Every frame gets its own palette instead of one shared palette, and smaller changes between frames are kept. Expect roughly a fifth more file size than Balanced.
• Match the width to where it will be seen. A GIF in a chat bubble or forum post is shown small, so 480 px is plenty; use 640 px, 800 px or Original for tutorials and slides that people read closely.
• Raise the frame rate only for fast motion. 20 or 25 fps helps sport, games and quick camera moves; talking heads and screen recordings look fine at 10 to 15 fps.
• Keep dithering on for faces, skies and gradients. Turn it off for flat graphics, where it only adds noise and bytes.
• Spend bytes on pixels, not seconds. Cutting a selection from 6 to 3 seconds halves the file, which pays for a larger width.

Because GIF is an image format from the late 1980s, not a video format. Each frame is stored as a picture of up to 256 colours and packed with LZW compression, which was designed for flat graphics. Video codecs predict each frame from the previous one and store only the difference, motion included, so a GIF is usually bigger than the video it came from, even at a lower resolution.

To shrink it, shorten the selection first, then lower the width or frame rate. If it still has to fit a limit, run it through the GIF compressor, or convert the GIF to MP4 where a video is accepted.

The converter runs in the browser, so there is nothing to install. Only the way you pick the video and where the GIF lands differ.

• Size before you export. The estimate follows every setting, so you know whether the GIF will fit before you wait for it.
• No upload, no queue. Private or long clips never leave your device, and a 1080p video does not have to travel to a server first.
• No watermark, no account. The GIF is yours exactly as it was encoded.
• Built-in optimisation. Unchanged pixels are stored as transparent and identical frames are merged, the same tricks GIF optimisers such as gifsicle use, so files stay small without a second tool.