Sometimes the GIF animations are preferred over bulky video files, especially when you are sharing them on social networking sites. The GIF animations are around 1 MB in size compared to 20-30 MB of the video and so can be quickly shared with your friends over Facebook or Twitter, without you having to wait for the video upload to be finished. If you want to create GIF animations from your video files, then the Instagiffer is the best application for you. It can take almost any type of the video file and convert it into a GIF animation. It also allows you to add various effects for the GIF animation like sepia, black & white, color fade, oil painting etc.
You can get Instagiffer in either the setup installer or the portable application package. It is available both for Windows and Mac operating systems. After the installation, you can launch it from the desktop shortcut.
Using the Instagiffer is a child’s play. First of all you have to select a video file that you want to convert into GIF animation. To select a video file click on the Load Video button and choose a video file from your computer. You can choose most of the video file formats including FLV, MP4, AVI, MPG etc.
Then you can customize the basic options like the starting video time, the duration of the GIF animation (by default it is only 3 seconds), smoothness, frame size, quality, brightness, playback rate etc. You can also add captions and image effects for the animation.
Once you have gone through all this, you can click on the Create GIF! button and it would go to work right away. In a short time, the GIF animation would be created on your desktop folder (you can change the GIF save folder by selecting File → Change save location from the menubar). After this it would show a preview of the GIF in a small window. You can also view the GIF image file using any standard image viewer like IrfanView or upload them to any social networking site.
Conclusion: The free Instagiffer can take your videos and lets you turn them into GIF animations. It can also take screenshots of anything on your computer and use them as GIF frames for the animations. Moreover, it can also open existing GIF files so that you can edit them.
You can download Instagiffer from http://instagiffer.com/.