MP4 to GIF

Keep it short

GIF stores nearly every frame in full, so length costs more than anything else. Five seconds at 480 px and 15 fps usually lands between 2 and 5 MB, which is fine for a chat or a README. Ten seconds at 800 px and 24 fps can easily pass 30 MB.

Set the start and end times here rather than trimming first, the conversion only reads the range you ask for.

The palette pass, and why it matters

A GIF can hold 256 colors per frame. The lazy way to reduce a video to that is to map it onto a fixed generic palette, which is why so many converted GIFs come back looking like they were made on a 1998 desktop: skin tones go blotchy, skies band into stripes, and anything dark turns to mud.

This runs two passes instead. The first walks your actual footage and builds a palette out of the colors that are really in it, so a clip that is mostly greens and browns gets 256 greens and browns rather than 256 colors spread evenly across a spectrum it never uses. The second pass maps the frames onto that palette. It is the difference between a GIF that looks like your video and one that looks like a mistake, and it costs an extra read of the file.

The three settings that decide the size

• Length is the strongest by a distance, because GIF stores nearly every frame in full. Five seconds is a GIF; fifteen is a problem.
• Width works on area, so halving it quarters the frame data. 480 px is fine for a chat window or a README; 800 px is a web page decision you should make deliberately.
• Frame rate is a straight multiplier. 15 fps looks like motion. 24 fps looks slightly smoother and costs 60% more.

Rough numbers: 5 seconds at 480 px and 15 fps usually lands between 2 and 5 MB. Ten seconds at 800 px and 24 fps can pass 30 MB, which is larger than the MP4 you started with and slower to load than a video would be.

Dithering, and the grain people ask about

Dithering scatters pixels of two available colors to fake a third, which is how 256 colors describe a gradient at all. It is why smooth areas can look faintly speckled. Sierra dithering handles gradients better at a larger file size; turning dithering off gives clean flat areas and visible banding wherever the picture was smooth. Neither is wrong, and which one looks better depends entirely on the footage.

If the destination will accept a video at all, it is worth asking whether it should. An MP4 of the same clip is a fraction of the size at far better quality. GIF earns its place only where video is not allowed: README files, some email clients, older forums and a few chat windows.

Common questions

Further reading

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