Frame Count & Delay A Primer

A very important aspect of GIF creation with GIF Brewery is perfecting your frame count / delay choice.

What are the frame count and frame delay settings?

Frame Count
The number of frames between the start and end times that GIF Brewery will extract from your video.
Frame Delay
The length of time that each of the frames will be displayed in the GIF.

So, how do I choose a good frame count and delay?

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.

That sounds reasonable... so a good frame count is what?

Actually, we want to choose the frame delay first. I'm personally a fan of 100ms, but 42ms is another popular option.

42? Really?

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).

No one said there would be math involved.

Deal with it. Your math teacher didn't know you wanted to create nice GIFs.

Okay, okay. Once I've got my frame delay, what about frame count?

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)

Huh?

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, that's easy... so, 100 vs. 42, which to choose?

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.

Okay, so I went with 42ms, but it GIF Brewery seems to be displaying it slowly...

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

Understood, but still, I set my frame delay as 10ms.

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.

So, that's it?

Yep, that's it. If you've got any questions feel free to /ask on Tumblr or tweet @helloresolvapps.

Happy GIF Brewing!