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DevBench

How to make an animated GIF from a video

  1. Drop a clip — MP4, WebM or MOV; segments under 30 seconds work best.
  2. Set the start time (in half-second steps) and the duration (1–30 seconds) to carve out the moment you want to loop.
  3. Choose the frame rate — 5, 10, 15 or 20 FPS — and the output width: 240, 320, 480 or 640 pixels; the height follows the aspect ratio.
  4. Create, then download the GIF; a preview plays before you commit.

Two passes for clean colours

GIF’s 256-colour palette is where naive conversions turn skies into bands. This tool avoids that with the standard two-pass technique: first an analysis pass builds an optimal palette from the actual frames (only the ones in your selected range), then a second pass maps every frame through that palette with ordered dithering to smooth the transitions. It takes marginally longer than a single pass and looks markedly better — the same method you would otherwise script with FFmpeg flags by hand.

Sizing expectations, and where it runs

GIF bytes grow fast: doubling FPS roughly doubles the size, and width counts twice because both dimensions scale. Start at 10 FPS and 480px for documentation-friendly clips; go lower for text-heavy screen recordings where fewer, sharper frames read better. Encoding runs entirely in your browser via the same FFmpeg.wasm engine as the Video Converter — the ~25MB engine downloads once from a CDN and is cached afterwards, while your video never leaves the device.

Also useful: Video Converter, Image Format Converter, and Image Compressor.