From TV to animated gif

[Doctor_Zaius]

New, but trying.

I plan to record a sporting event from DirecTV to my Panasonic E80H's Hard Drive, dub a segment of the game from the E80 to a DVD-RAM disc, then copy the file to my PC via a drive that reads DVD-RAM. I believe I'm all set up to this point...

I then want to take a SMALL segment of this file which is now on my PC and turn it into an animated GIF file that's not too large (<1 MB let's say).

What software can I use to accomplish this, and are there specific areas of this forum or other sites you would recomment I read up on?

Thanks.

In case it's not obvious, I'm not just interested in converting the dvd data to .gif, but I also need to significantly decrease the size of the tiny segment I want to convert. Thanks

[redwudz]

I just went to the Google search engine and typed "making animated gifs" and got several pages of websites. Try it and good luck.

[Gees]

If you wanted to make an ani gif like to use as an animated avatar or something, you could try PaintShop Pro. It includes Animation Shop and lets you use avis and mpgs.

Of course, you'll be limited on the amount of frames and image size, but you could work with it to get a short clip small enough to use.

added info: Animation Shop (in PaintShopPro) does let you:

1.) limit the range of frames,
2.) choose how many frames to lose in that range (+ skip duplicate frames), and
3.) resize the whole ani down to whatever you need - by pixel size or % of original.

Towards the end of the process you can optimise it even further to reduce filesize.

An excellent program all 'round, & not too expensive. One of my favorites!

I was just on the site http://www.jasc.com/product.asp?pf%5Fid=003 and see they also offer Animation Shop as a standalone program. And there's a trial version you could download and check out. That'd be good if you already have an imaging editing program you like.

Good luck - have fun.

[racer-x]

Photoshop 6 and up comes with Image Ready. That's what I used to make the animated gif for my avatar. It is composed of video stills of me racing my bike down the quarter-mile.

You can pretty much create any animation you want with it.

[g_shocker182]

Try CoffeeCup software:

http://download.com.com/3000-6676-7520308.html?tag=lst-0-3