LOOPING!

January 13, 2010 8:34 PM

Hello, filter. We're making a movie in Final Cut Express, and one of our desires is to have an animated gif looping in the background during green screen footage. Yet, we are unable to do this. Does anyone have any solutions? Thanks.
posted by cloeburner to Technology (5 answers total)

Not an expert on this and never used Express, but I'm going to guess no film editing program will accept a gif. You probably need to change it into a QT .mov in some other program, then bring that into FCE.
posted by drjimmy11 at 8:38 PM on January 13, 2010

Good call drj...I use an Avid primarily, but I believe you can also import .mov into FCP. Then just lay it down repeatedly under your matte.
posted by Unred at 8:44 PM on January 13, 2010

Where are you running into problems, the green screening or the animated gif not animating? I'm going to assume the gif.

What happens when you bring the file into FCE? Does it recognize it at all (maybe only showing first frame)?

There are free programs out there that can take frames out of an animated gif. Get each frame, save as a .jpg or .png, and put them on the timeline for a frame or two each in order. (Or whatever length looks best). Copy and paste as necessary to loop.
posted by yellowbinder at 8:44 PM on January 13, 2010

gifsicle breaks animated gifs into a sequence of stills. Any video editor can load stills.
posted by idiopath at 9:07 PM on January 13, 2010

You can then load the stills into a Quicktime Movie with Quicktime Player 7 (Open Image Sequence under File) and then save that either as a reference movie or a self-contained movie at the resolution you want, depending on whether you're doing SD or HD.
posted by jeffkramer at 8:58 AM on January 14, 2010