Create an Animated GIF From Video On A Mac

You can turn any video into an animated GIF using the latest version of Apple's free Keynote presentation software. A new feature of Keynote is the ability to export as a GIF. To convert a video, you can create single-slide presentations using the video and export. You can also easily crop and trim the video, as well as add text or even combine several videos into one GIF.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to take one of your videos and make an animated GIF.
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So say you want to take one of your videos and create an animated GIF to share online because we all know what the internet really needs is more GIFs. Previously you'd need to buy an app to do this. There are plenty of good apps that can do it. But thanks to Keynote's ability to export animated GIFs you can use it to take one of your videos and create a GIF without any additional software.
I do want to get one thing out of the way before we go any further. Yes, I pronounce it GIF because as a guy named Gary I gotta go with GIF.
Alright. So first make sure you're using the latest version of Keynote 9.0.2 because you want the ability to export as an animated GIF. I'm going to create a presentation the same screen ratio as the video. Since it's a 16 x 9 widescreen video I'm going to use a wide theme. I'm just going to use the standard black background there. I'm going to zoom out so I can see the entire thing and get rid of the default text. 
Now I'm going to drag and drop the video from the Finder right into Keynote. Drop it right in there. You want to make sure you lock it there so it fills the entire screen. So now you just have a single slide in a presentation that has video on it. I could, if I want, create the animated GIF right now. Go to File, Export To, Animated GIF. But I'm going to work on it a little bit. One of the things that I can do is I can trim this to get only the portion of the video I want. So with the video selected I go to Format, Movie, and then here you can see there's Trim. I can trim it to what I want. So say I want to capture this first firework going off here. So I can get it to that point, right there, and just capture a small portion of the video.
I can then go to Export, to only export that portion. Now when I export there are a few options to look at. The first is the Resolution. So I can create a very large, you can see here 1080 x 608, GIF. I can go smaller 720 x 405; 480 x 270 and smallest. A lot of GIFs are really pretty small. You put them in text messages and things so I'll go with the smallest here. I can also adjust the Frame Rate down to 15 frames per second and create a smaller file. Auto Advance, I want to set that to zero because if I don't, if I leave it one second, it's going to put a one second delay at the end of the GIF so when it loops it will delay for a second at the end.
So now I go to Next and I'll export this to the desktop. So now here's my GIF here. I can hit the spacebar for QuickLook to see a preview of it. You can see it's just this looping GIF. Just a few seconds long. There's still more we can do. We can crop the dimensions of the video. We can even add text to it very easily since this is in Keynote.
Let's get rid of this video here and I'm going to bring in another one. This is a 640 x 480 video. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the background here and then go to Document and then Document and change the size to Custom Size here and then change it so that it's 640 x 480. The exact size of this little video. I'm going to zoom back out and I'm going to stretch this to fit perfectly in there. This is an ideal kind of video for looping. 
So let's make that happen. With the video selected go to Format, then Movie, and go to Trim here. I'm going to notice at the beginning here I can see this blade is right at that corner. So let's see if we can match that here at the end. Let's get this next blade right at the same spot. Now I don't want to do it right at the same spot because it will repeat that last frame. I want to do it like one step before there. So you can see the blade is just before it gets to the corner there. So now a loop should make it look really nice. Let's give it a try. 
Going to export to Animated GIF. 15 frames per second. I'm going to make sure that Auto Advance is set to zero so there's no delay between the loop and I'm going to export this. Now if we check out this video we can see it loops really nicely. You don't even notice there when it's actually going through the loop because the blade is hitting the same point there at the corner.
Next let's add some text. It's so easy to do since this is Keynote. I can just add a text box here. I can move that here and type something. Enlarge it and put that where I want. I can even add another one if I'm trying to promote a website or something. Then export it and it's just going to have that as part of it now. So here's the new GIF.
Here's some other ideas. I created a custom size here of 200 x 300. I've put a video in and set it up so I'm not showing the entire video. Just this portion of it is actually in the presentation area. So when I export all I'm going to get is that. So it's real easy to crop a video and create custom sizes. 
Here I've combined two videos by putting two slides. On the first slide I have a video here and I have it set to trim to basically to the first two seconds of the video. On the second frame I have a completely different video and I've also got that trimmed to be the first two seconds. Then when I export I get an animated GIF that shows two seconds of one and then two seconds of the other and then looping back and forth. You can combine a whole bunch of videos to create a little bit of a story.
There's so much else you can do because you're in Keynote here. You can do things that combine two videos on the same slide. You can have different slides showing sections of the same video with different pieces of text overlaid on each one. But you are going to be missing some features of more advanced animated GIF software like the ability to control compression. The ability to control the length of each frame of the slide and things like that. But for a lot of uses Keynote is going to be just as good and in someways is going to be even better.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Create an Animated GIF From Video On A Mac”

Ian MacGregor

6 years ago

I had installed iMovie a few days ago to see if I could do this but I'm more familiar with the iWork apps. This appears to be much easier in Keynote. Thank you, Gary!

Gene

FANTASTIC VIDEO! Thanks Gary! Keep up the good work!

Andy

I want to create an animated GIF from an iPhone Live Photo - will this method work for me or is there a better start point?

Gary Rosenzweig

Andy: On your Mac? This method will work. Export from Photos using "unmodified original" option and you'll get a picture and a video file. Then use the video file in Keynote.

Comments Closed.

Create an Animated GIF From Video On A Mac

Comments: 4 Responses to “Create an Animated GIF From Video On A Mac”

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