★Gif Tutorial by EBX★

Let’s make a gif!

[DISCLAIMER: I’ll be showing you how to make gifs one way. I personally use many different programming software depending on what type of gif I want, but I’ll only be showing you how to make gifs using video-editing software, specifically Sony Vegas.]

Also, I'm sorry that the tutorial is a bit off, but english is not my native language and I tried to make it as short as possible so it would be easy to follow. Still hope you learn something :two_hearts:

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There are two types of gifs I want to talk about. We have realistic gifs that look a little somethin like this:

And we have what I call ‘’Tumblr gifs’’, which are gifs that consist of one not-moving image, enhanced and surrounded by other moving images. They look a little something like this:

Step 1: software

This must come as no surprise but you need a video-editing programme to make these gifs. You’re actually making small videos that we’ll later convert into images.

I personally use Sony Vegas Pro, which is commonly used by companies to edit commercials, movies and audio. But if you can’t afford a $599 :sweat_smile: programme, there’s also Vegas Movie Studio (Platinum) by Sony which is created for personal use and costs about $50 (or $80 if you want the deluxe version). And if you don’t want to spend money at all you can look for free s online, just be careful because you don’t want your precious computer crashing because of a virus.

Here are some (legal) free video editing software you can check out:

Windows Movie Maker

Filmora (Free Trial)

Corel VideoStudio Pro (Free trial)

Cyberlink Power Director (Free trial)

I would recommend Filmora out of these because it’s the easiest.

Step 2: Preparation

If you’re going to make a realistic gif, then you have to make a plan beforehand to know what images you need. For the one I showed earlier (with the wings and stuff..) I decided I needed two separate images: one with her wings spread and one with her wings folded. I won’t be showing you how to photoshop such images in this tutorial, we’ll do that another time. But to show you, I went from this:

To these:

If you’re planning on making a ‘’tumblr gif’’, then it of course comes down to your own personal preference and taste, but I do recommend mapping out whatever it is you want your gif to look like.

Just make sure you save your sims’ images as PNG!

And of course remove the background etc. but you should know that already, right?

Step 3: Editing

Let’s go into Sony Vegas Pro (or whatever software you’re using) and open up our images. It should look a little something like this:

Now, on the left bottom side we can see our Layers. Let’s say I want to add a background and some other cool PNG images; I’ll have to add a few more layers for that. We do that by right clicking one of our TEXT layers and select ‘’insert video track’’. You can add as many as you want.

Now, I’m going to add a background and drag it to my bottom text layer, like so:

Now we see, my background doesn’t cover everything I want, so I’m going to scale it. Press this little button on your background layer:

Now, make sure you activate these two buttons if you want to keep the proportions of your background the same, and after that drag the corner of the box outwards until it covers all the black.

Now it should look like this:

Next, we’ll be adding some PNG stuff. This is up to your own preference!

Just make sure you place each PNG on a different layer!

I placed this image on top of what I have, but it doesn’t look quite right. It covers my entire sim!

So I’ll add an effect on top of this image to make it look better. Go to your ‘’Video FX’’ tap and look for an effect that you like. Then, just drag it on top of your image and you’re done!

Now we’ll move the text by pressing the same icon as we did when we wanted to scale our background, but now we’ll move and rotate the box to wherever we like!

This works the same for any other image you put into your project! And although you can’t see it on the pictures, but the text does actually move.

Now, let’s render our gif!

Press ‘’project’’ on the top menu and choose ‘’make movie’’:

(Now, what’s important by making a gif is the size especially here on SA because your gifs can’t be too large or else they won’t !)

Now choose ‘’’save to my hard drive’’ and THEN choose ADVANCED OPTIONS.

This will pop up:

For gifs you use online, make sure you go to MainConcept AVC/AAC and then select Internet HD. THEN click on ‘’customize template’’, it’ll take you this:

You need to pay attention to these three things: Frame Size, Profile and Frame rate. The lower these three settings, the less mb’s your gifs will be which is GOOD.

Frame size will determine the properties of your gif. HD videos are usually 1920by1080 but we don’t need that, so choose a lower setting like 854by480. Now, if your gif contains a LOT of images and effects, you’ll need to adjust the other two settings as well, if not LEAVE THEM ALONE. You can set ‘’profile’’ to ‘’baseline’’ and choose your frame rate, which is how smooth your gif will look. If you’re done, press ok and then save it on your computer.

Now we’re going to convert our gif. There are many free converting websites online so I’d recommend you check these out:

https://cloudconvert.com/mp4-to-gif

https://ezgif.com/video-to-gif

http://www.online-convert.com/

Select your video and convert it to a gif. You’re done! Just make sure your gif doesn’t exceed about 6 mb or else it won’t load on SA :(

I'll be showing you how to make realistic gifs in my next blog!

Here’s the gif we made today: