Thread by @unicodeveloper

Day 8: One of the most popular cases of video interaction I have seen on social media is folks turning videos into animated GIFs.

Several tools are available to turn excerpts of videos into gifs readily. @cloudinary is one of them.

I’ll show you how #25DaysOfMediaMagic 🐐👌🏿

Note: Cloudinary supports delivering your videos as animated images in either GIF or WebP formats.

Turning a video into a GIF is you simply just changing the URL extension to ‘.gif’. Insane! 🤯

Say you have a ‘prosper.mp4’ video served by @cloudinary. Change ‘.mp4’ to ‘.gif’

That’s it. I swear that’s it. You’re surprised right? Me too when I first learned this 2 years ago. 😅

But that’s just scratching the itch, there are tons of techniques you can apply in making an animated GIF from a video.

So, hold my hand...let me lead you into it 😉😍😌

1. You can take a video, take a sample of x frames, and set a delay of y milliseconds between the frames and tell it to run infinitely.

Example:

x = 40
y = 100
loop = infinite

Execution:

vs_40 - 40 sample frames
dl_100 - delay of 100ms
e_loop - infinite loop

So based on the above, this is how your URL will look like: #25DaysOfMediaMagic

Now, visit that URL and see it in action:

👉 res.cloudinary.com/demo/video/upl… #25DaysOfMediaMagic

As a programmer, you might be judging me in your mind already & asking questions like:

- "What if I don't want it to loop infinitely? Can I control that"?

The answer is an astounding YES.

Say you want it to loop only thrice, set 3 as a value to 'e_loop' as as shown below.

2. You can deliver an animated WebP file too. However, you need to add the `fl_awebp` and `fl_animated` parameter in the URL.

Check it out here: res.cloudinary.com/demo/video/upl… #25DaysOfMediaMagic

But wait a minute. #NewsFlash

Did you know that animated GIFs have a huge file size compared to their video counterparts? 🤔

So why not convert the GIF to an mp4 or WebM format before posting it to the web? The results are reduced file size & low bandwidth utilization 👌🏿

Try it out yourself:

These are two GIFs.

One in the original `.gif` format and the other converted to `.mp4` by simply changing the extension in the URL.

What if I told you that the first animated GIF is a whooping 6.6 MB, while the second is 319 KB? 😯 #25DaysOfMediaMagic

You can always download and compare.

Finally, I'll leave you with an article on how to convert videos to GIFs in kotlin-built @Android apps with @cloudinary. Mobile developers, you'll love this! #25DaysOfMediaMagic

A new week, another opportunity to be world class. 🔥🚀

Article: cloudinary.com/blog/convertin…

Written by the one and only @kingidee 🔥🔥🔥 #25DaysOfMediaMagic