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Advice regarding High Resolution Gif Creation Tools
TheRoarOfTheCrowd
Member, Swaye's Wigwam Posts: 1,730 
@SpoonieLuv, @GrundleStiltzkin, and others...
I could use some advice here regarding GIF creating tools... I am well versed in GIF tools that can do a bunch of clever stuff but I am looking for a 4K resolution [or the highest quality available tool set to create GIF's]... I want to use them in my business web site and need to be able to control the speed, add text, convert from stills and movies, be able to edit frame by frame, and prefer the flexibility of employing GIF's from a number of standpoints to add to my developing web site.
The issue is resolution quality... lots of tools let you do some or all of the above [all of the above is what I want] but i haven't found one which produces 4 k resolution quality or even super HD, and the quality drop off is disturbing.
Any advice will be appreciated... the app I'm wanting would be for a PC, price is not a concern, I expect to pay for the quality I'm hoping for... Anybody? Thanks.
I could use some advice here regarding GIF creating tools... I am well versed in GIF tools that can do a bunch of clever stuff but I am looking for a 4K resolution [or the highest quality available tool set to create GIF's]... I want to use them in my business web site and need to be able to control the speed, add text, convert from stills and movies, be able to edit frame by frame, and prefer the flexibility of employing GIF's from a number of standpoints to add to my developing web site.
The issue is resolution quality... lots of tools let you do some or all of the above [all of the above is what I want] but i haven't found one which produces 4 k resolution quality or even super HD, and the quality drop off is disturbing.
Any advice will be appreciated... the app I'm wanting would be for a PC, price is not a concern, I expect to pay for the quality I'm hoping for... Anybody? Thanks.
Comments
Adobe Creative Cloud is around $35 per month for the entire suite of tools. Premiere can render .gif files from video. You can also generate .gif files from stills in either Photoshop or, preferably, After Effects. What I've found is that you have to be VERY careful to take the quality way down to avoid the files being ridiculously massive. .gif is a less efficient compression (by far) than h.264, so, say, a 5-second .gif file will look shittier and be 10x bigger than the 5-second video file from which it was pulled. The .gif compression algorithm is from something like 1984.
If you're trying to have good looking video on a website, look into HTML5. Skip the gif and just use video elements if you're looking for a content rich page.
If you want to go all professional grade, all my frens who pump gas in a video format use Final Cut Pro these days. Generally, that's the gold standard for working with video files at the moment, and it's pretty intuitive and makes JIFFing pretty easy.
so after the good comments I’m deducing that I need high res screen video capture and flexible video editing tools, and then I need to pay attention to the playback format for “universal” compatibility, loading time and bandwidth as well as resolution
so my final format should be some form of MP4 or HTML5? Is that correct? and the correct use of Jiffing is less than 10 seconds for the loading time and resulting resolution limitations?
Again my goal is super sharp resolution for the final output
<video>element that allows for streaming directly without a 3rd party player like Flash.If you want to load a website and be looking at 4K video (I still have no idea why you would want to do this, as probably fewer than 5% of people browse at anything above 1080), your workflow would be like this:
1.) Clip and render your video using h.264 compression (not as efficient as h.265 but supported by all browsers) and in an .mp4 container.
2.) Add a
<video>element to your website. There are many attributes you can assign to make your video behave in the manner you want. If all you want is for your viewer to load the page and see a fullscreen video, you'd use CSS to set the element to 100% height and width. If you hate your viewers and want your viewers to hate you, you set the video to autoplay using the autoplay attribute in the video element (I believe Chrome does not allow autoplay unless muted).You can add playback controls, playlists, etc. through the attributes. This is totally something you can fight your way through, trust me. Plenty of reading online that'll get you there. HTML/CSS is relatively easy, and there are TONS of references out there to help you. When all else fails, find a site that looks like what you want, copy it wholesale, and edit the CSS to tune to your liking.
Btw, even using video instead of .gif, 4K is going to be YUGE. Like, "Fuck this; I'm not waiting for this to load/play" yuge. You'll still want to do your best to compress your video down to as small as possible. The key measurement here is bitrate. That's the realtime bandwidth your video will take up as it plays. Measured in megabits per second (Mbps). This number is the ultimate determinant of your video's image quality, really. You know what the difference in image quality is between, say, 12 Mbps 4K and 12 Mbps FHD? If the video contains a lot of motion, the FHD will probably look better on most screens, that's what. Without getting into how video compression actually works, just trust me that bitrate is far more important than resolution. Which is to say, don't get hung up on 4K unless you plan on encoding at a bitrate that's at least 20 Mbps. And if you're going to do that, don't expect everybody to be able to even stream that video in realtime. That's a firehose.
For streaming on the web at a rate that expect everybody to be able to view without constant buffering, I target 12 Mbps. 12 Mbps beats 4K video into a bloody pulp, so I don't even bother with it, rendering down to 1080. Don't notice the difference on my 4K TV, as the compression is the limitation.
Lastly, you're going to need a place to host all of these giant video files that you're embedding. These get quite large, hence why most people just upload to YouTube and embed on their site instead of self-hosting. If you're going to host your own video, I recommend Amazon's AWS S3. Dirt cheap as far as these things go (pennies per GB, IIRC), and plenty fast to stream high quality video. If you want it to be REALLY fast, you can pay extra for media streaming services that store your videos on local servers all over the place to eliminate lag.
Hope this helps.
Thank you, you are a complete stud [as you know], your comments are a nice gift and I'm understanding what you are saying clearly and will adjust accordingly.
Really Great info about Bit rate... thanks, and the advice on settings to try as well.
And no, I don't need 4k I just need really sharp video so once I'm rendering and uploading, i can start making choices regarding the mix of outputs to achieve closer to "universal" ability to quickly load and play back without loading players etc... by picking high quality formats that can play on today's wide variety of equipment.
Yah I'm planning on hosting on AWS and wondered if i couldn't just preload the video content and then just mirror the already opened content for "instant open" with less of a buffering issue... can it work that way? I'm under the impression that it can.
If done well a low rez GIF can be very effective.
This one is all ASCII so it doesn't require much memory. And you can just make these in a text editor.
In the end, though, you're still limited by the end user's connection speed. If somebody's on their phone on most data plans, for instance, you'd just be wasting your money on that Cloudfront subscription.
I know it sounds cheesy, but YouTube is a decent option for doing what you're trying to do. You can embed YouTube videos onto any webpage, and your videos are automatically served up by a lightning fast CDN for free (well, at the expense of your viewers who are too dumb to block ads having to watch ads). And you can even upload those insanely huge high-bitrate 4K videos to YouTube and let them handle the scaling for slow connection speed. Your viewers in the sticks on a cell phone will see it on their tiny screen at 480p and the Warcraft guy from South Park will see 25 Mbps 4K.
Yep ASCII gifs are where it's at.
You can do them in color too.