Animated GIF to Youtube

March 8, 2010 10:00 PM

Looking for a way to convert an Animated GIF to a format suitable for uploading to YouTube, while also preserving the blocky pixel nature of the GIF. I would prefer something free that works on a Mac, but any suggestions that are cheap for mac or windows would be appreciated.

Main computer is running OS X 10.6. I also have an old computer running XP available. Slightly gruesome example GIF here.

posted by WhackyparseThis to computers & internet (5 answers total)

iShowU has a 30 second demo for video screen capture. Just export to one of the formats YouTube imports.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:44 PM on March 8, 2010

As far as I know mencoder can handle animated .gif as an input format. Beyond that, I'd look at exactly what image/frame size YouTube uses as default, scale your animation up (using your .gif creation tool) by an integer multiple to the largest size possible that'll fit into YouTube's frame, pad to fit exactly, then encode.

I also recall a tutorial somewhere on YouTube's help that talked about the parameters needed for encoding so that YouTube didn't have to re-encode your video.

You basically want to arrange things so that (a) your image size is an integer multiple of the original (to eliminate alias blurring), (b) padded out to YouTube's frame size (to eliminate stretching / resizing and further blurring), and (c) already using YouTube's codec format and attributes (to eliminate blurring due to recoding). That said, compressed video is not just lossy in the colour domain, it's also spatially and temporally lossy - so some blurring is almost inevitable.
posted by Pinback at 10:47 PM on March 8, 2010

Get a program that will do screen captures. You can even get ones where you draw a box of any shape you want and it will record a video of it.
posted by brenton at 11:03 PM on March 8, 2010

Quicktime 7 will open animated gifs - if you've upgraded to QT pro you can export in any number of formats, but I believe that the standard version of QT7 should also allow you to export in a web/youtube friendly format too.
posted by elroyel1327 at 4:14 AM on March 9, 2010

I believe GraphicConverter will do this as well.
posted by WCityMike at 10:04 AM on March 9, 2010