Using animated gifs in iMovie

Hello!

I am a new mac user, and also new to Mac forums hoping to find a most elusive answer to my dilemma!

I am attempting to turn a *animated* gif image into a video file with audio added that I will eventually upload to, say, youtube.

I am having lots of trouble finding any real answer to how to do this.

Apparently there is a way to use Gimp to separate the frames as layers and save them individually as jpegs or pngs and then import them into iMovie as regular photos and simply add audio. But I have just downloaded Gimp and am having trouble using it. I find a lot of tutorials on how to turn jpegs into gifs but not the other way around.

Thinking about popular media and internet memes, it seems like many more people *must* have really struggled with this problem and found an answer, unless they *all* use PC? Halp?

Much obliged,

Casey

Welcome to the Forum If u go into Safari and load the gif it should play Ok, then u can do screen record in Quick Time X if you are on Snow Leopard.

There are a couple of options, the one I can think of off the top of my head tho, with the animated gif, open it in preview (try just double clicking the gif file) - on the right hand side, there should be a column showing all of the images in the gif, have a folder open that you can see off to the side then drag each image individually into the folder.

I know there is a quicker way, but I'm just not thinking of it atm, but wanted to give you something you could work with. Will create TIFF files from the drag and drops

I have dragged and dropped the TIFF files. Do I have to convert them or can I use them in iMovie? I am not familiar with that file extension~

Collin Bl said:

Welcome to the Forum If u go into Safari and load the gif it should play Ok, then u can do screen record in Quick Time X if you are on Snow Leopard.

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Also, this records the whole screen, as well as the gif I want to record... but also massive amounts of empty space I do not want...

I think you can use them in iMovie. .TIFF is a standard graphics format, worst case, it's fairly easy to convert to a GIF, JPG, TGA, etc.

If you have QT7 Pro (don't think you have a save as function in QT7, unfortunately, I don't have any Macs at hand that have just QT7), and Perian installed ( Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components ) you can Open QT7, open the gif - make sure it plays, then if it does, go to file and select Save As and it should pop up to save as a self contained movie. it will then be in a .mov format that should be editable.

Note: I just tested with dragged out tiffs from an animated gif I have here, and I was able to drag and drop the .tiff files into iMovie '08, so it should work with iMovie '08 or '09 - hopefully you have one of those two versions, anything earlier, I honestly don't know.

Nethfel said:

I think you can use them in iMovie. .TIFF is a standard graphics format, worst case, it's fairly easy to convert to a GIF, JPG, TGA, etc.

If you have QT7 Pro (don't think you have a save as function in QT7, unfortunately, I don't have any Macs at hand that have just QT7), and Perian installed ( Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components ) you can Open QT7, open the gif - make sure it plays, then if it does, go to file and select Save As and it should pop up to save as a self contained movie. it will then be in a .mov format that should be editable.

Note: I just tested with dragged out tiffs from an animated gif I have here, and I was able to drag and drop the .tiff files into iMovie '08, so it should work with iMovie '08 or '09 - hopefully you have one of those two versions, anything earlier, I honestly don't know.

Click to expand...

I dragged the tiff files into the event library in iMovie '09, but when played one after the other (there are about 76 frames) in 'zooms' in and out and plays incredibly slowly. I guess I can understand the speed, and probably fix it, but the weird zooming in and out thing throws me for a loop. I have no idea why its happening D:

Btw, I truly appreciate your help~!

Attached is the image I am attempting to convert!

Awe, it got attached as a jpg rather then the gif, I'll pm you my email address and if you want you can send me the gif and I'll convert and send it back.

The slow pan and zoom is the ken burns effect, you need to turn that off in iMovie if you're trying to do image by image...

Also, iMovie isn't great if your intent is to convert the animated GIF to a video as Nethfel described. The reason is that the minimum number of frames for an image is 5.

Since I have it, I'd try using QuickTime Player 7 Pro to change the format.

That is a good point XStep that I didn't think of (prolly 'cause I don't use iMovie enough to remember those limitations ) - my original goal was to give him a simple way of getting the individual images (based on his original question) or a rendering done. If I had thought about that 5frame min in iMovie I woulda suggested something different instead of extracting the images since it would have really slowed down the animation in the original GIF.

I did actually help the OP out and converted it to a .mov for them and sent it back with how to do it in QTP... I don't know if the OP even has it, but it's not a bad investment to get for when you need it (honestly, I had forgotten that I had it until I was looking for quick solutions for the OP )

Nethfel said:

That is a good point XStep that I didn't think of (prolly 'cause I don't use iMovie enough to remember those limitations ) -

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LOL! That was fresh in my mind because I answered another related question on it in the last week or so.

QT Pro is a handy tool for the low price of $29.