Using GIFs in Sony Vegas?

[Teryolilio]

I want to make a funny montage with some trippy effects so I looked up a bunch of animated GIFs through google and wanted to put them in Vegas. Here's the thing: When I do this, Vegas starts lagging and is completely unable to play the files. My computer is pretty damn good but it lags SO BAD and when it finally is able to start playing, NOTHING is happening in the preview window. Its crazy. Ive never had this problem before.

What's going on here?

[racer-x]

Nothing going on there, you just don't understand what's going on. Animated GIFs are a series of frames played in sequence. If you want to import animated GIFs into an NLE like Vegas, you need to extract the frames and import as an image sequence.

It's as simple as that.............................

[Teryolilio]

You don't get it, I've been able to do this before. But it's these GIFs in particular that seem to be the problem because they are 1MB in size or something?

I guess your method COULD work. But, how am I supposed to do that? Through Photoshop or something?

[poisondeathray]

vegas should import gif's , but if there is a problem with your specific ones, you can load the problem gif into vdub , file=>export=> image sequence

[Teryolilio]

That solved the problem. Very easy way to split gifs! Though it's a picky chore, but it definitely works much better than earlier.

Thanks to you both!

[poisondeathray]

If you have many of them to do , you can run a ffmpeg batch script to convert , for example, all the .gifs in a folder to image sequences

e.g. from the commandline in the folder of gifs

for %a in ("*.gif") do ffmpeg -i %a %~na%03d.png

[Teryolilio]

Thanks, but my problem is that once the picture files are in Vegas I have to trim them down in order to get them to move. When you put a picture file into the timeline it's a pretty huge size, pretty "long" so to speak, and I have to cut them down to more than 10 times the size. So it takes a lot of pointing and clicking. But I'll manage.

[poisondeathray]

Thanks, but my problem is that once the picture files are in Vegas I have to trim them down in order to get them to move. When you put a picture file into the timeline it's a pretty huge size, pretty "long" so to speak, and I have to cut them down to more than 10 times the size. So it takes a lot of pointing and clicking. But I'll manage.

What do you mean trim them ? Is not one frame = one frame ?

When you import the image sequence, there is a checkbox in the open dialog box for "open still image sequence" . Select the first frame of the sequence , and make sure that box is checked off . You may have to change the FPS of the sequence (right click, properties)

But if you import them as individual stills in a folder (not a sequence) , each one will be an individual element, and the length will be determined by the "default still length" in the options. It's set to 5 seconds but you can change it. This method of importing is meant for slideshows - probably not what you want

[TreeTops]

I think he means to reduce the resolution of those images. He used the word trim incorrectly. We really don't know too much about those animated gifs he downloaded from a google search he did. Since animated gifs are already almost like a video when displayed so he should just get a gif editor mentioned above and keep it simple. Stop using a Video editor like Vegas for this. (Unless you do what racer-x recommended in post #2)

[Guy Rocky]

Yes I have the same problem with GIFs. I am using GIFs for green screening as videos leave terrible lines (if you reduce you get a black frame) and if you crop you get the same. However GIFs (especially transparent backgrounds) don't seem to have this problem - but the play back is awful and my PC is causing Vegas to run slow enough as it is (it can only preview in 1/2 mode now).
I have Vegas 12 but I never upgrade as they never seem to address the problems that concern me!!!