A very important aspect of GIF creation with GIF Brewery is perfecting your frame count / delay choice.
Before choosing, I'll make the assumption that you want the duration of your GIF to equal the duration of your clip. So, if you selected a five second portion of a video, you'll create a five second GIF.
Actually, we want to choose the frame delay first. I'm personally a fan of 100ms, but 42ms is another popular option.
Really! 42ms is equivalent to 24fps, while 100ms is equivalent to 10fps. In other words, if you set the frame delay to 100ms, it will show 10 of your frames every second.
For reference, (frames per second) = (1000) / (frame delay)
.
Deal with it. Your math teacher didn't know you wanted to create nice GIFs.
Once you've selected your frame delay, convert it to frames per second with the above equation.
Then simply multiply the frames per second by the length of your clip (in seconds)
Okay, here's an example. You've selected a 2 second clip from a video and set your frame delay to 42 ms. That means you'll want 24 frames per second. So, the frame count should be 2 x 24 = 48 frames
.
Well, if you are at all concerned about file size (I'm looking at you, Tumblr), I'd suggest 100ms. That means you'll only have 10 frames per second, which makes for a smaller GIF. It also means that frame count is simply 10 x (clip length)
, which you can hopefully do without a calculator.
If you just want the silkiest smooth GIF, then go with 42ms or lower.
So, about that... I'm about to get technical. For the in-app preview of a GIF, GIF Brewery uses something Apple calls NSImageView
. When it displays a GIF, it will only display a GIF at 100ms or higher frame delay. Thus, making the GIF appear slower than it is. But fear not, GIF Brewery didn't screw up and did properly set your GIFs properties. Simply open the GIF in your browser of choice and that'll give you the true representation.
We are looking into ways to fix this in GIF Brewery 3.0
Through some investigation from a GIF Brewery user, it appears that any frame delay that is below 20ms will always be displayed as if it has a frame delay of 100ms by OS X.
Yep, that's it. If you've got any questions feel free to /ask on Tumblr or tweet @helloresolvapps.