Create GIFs from short videos, easily

Ever wanted to turn a short portion of a video into an animated GIF? It isn’t as difficult as some people may lead you to believe. There are walkthroughs that utilize VLC and GIMP to achieve the goal. Admittedly, its an extremely convoluted guide that requires a great deal of time and effort to accomplish.

We have a far simpler solution than the one mentioned earlier. All you need is a program called Shotcut. It’s an open Source video editing app that’s available for Mac, PC and Linux. It’s a full fledged video editor with the ability to convert your projects into a wide array of output formats with various frame rate requirements.

Budding video editors should look to Shotcut to gain experience before eventually making the leap to paid software such as Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier Pro. But that is a topic for another day. In this article we will show you how easy it is to convert a short portion of a clip to a GIF format.

Disclaimer: If you have a fresh copy of Shotcut, chances are it won’t look the same as our screenshots. But that can be changed. Click on the View tab and select Playlist, Filters, Timeline and Export.

Step 1: Selecting a file
Assuming you already have the short clip on hand, simply drag and drop said file in the playlist section. It should now automatically open in the playback section to the right of the playlist. Feel free to pause at any time.

Step 2: Grab File
Click on the file in Playlist then drag it to the timeline.

Step 3: Adjust length
Move the playhead to your selected location to trim file if needed. Use the S key to make cuts were necessary.

Step 4: Export
Once done, click on the Export tab. On the left hand corner, you should see a whole list of export formats. Scroll through and select GIF (animation).

Step 5
On the pane on the right, you should see the export setting. Here, you can also adjust the resolution of your output format (Click on Advanced button). If you don’t wish to do so, click Export.

Step 6
Export the File by clicking export. Further tweaking of the file format is possible by clicking on the codec tab and adjusting output quality, GOP and B frames.

We hope this guide was helpful, if it was, please share it with others who wish to convert thier short videos in GIFs.

Helpful Links:
Download Shotcut
Shotcut Video Editing Masterclass on YouTube