Computer Tricks and Secrets

Animated GIF images may remind you of those cluttered and distracting homepages of the Geocities era but take a peek at these cinemagraphs and it might forever change the way you think of GIFs. These are animated GIFs created using frames of classic movie scenes that play in an endless loop. How to Create GIF Animations? There are free tools available that let you easily convert video clips into animated GIFs that you can later host on sites like Flickr or Tumblr – not all image hosting sites support animated GIFs but the one mentioned here do. This is a two-step process – first convert the video into a sequence of image frames and then assemble these frames into a looping GIF animation with some custom delay. Step 1: Download FFmpeg and extract the ffmpeg.exe file to, say, the c:\ffmpeg\ folder. The .7z files can be unzipped using the 7-zip utility. Step 2: Now we’ll extract the frames from our video file. The command* is simple. c:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -i movie.avi img-%03d.gif If your...

A new web called  GIFDeck  helps you convert any presentation hosted on SlideShare into an animated GIF file. All you have to do is specify the deck URL and the app will fetch the individual slides as images and stitches them all together in a single GIF that will auto-play and auto-loop. Here’s a sample GIF created from a SlidShare presentation on Steve Jobs. The app only converts the initial 10 slides, probably to keep the size of GIF within limits, but you do have an option to queue all the slides of a deck for conversion. While SlideShare does offer an HTML5 based option to embed presentations on external websites, the GIF based approach will still come handy in many situations. For instance, you can send your presentation in an email message – just drag the GIF in your Gmail compose window – and recipients will be able to scan through the deck right inside their email client. Similarly, you can tweet the GIF or post it on Tumblr and the people can quickly view your slides in any b...