When a GIF is the right choice
GIF is a 1987 format with a 256-colour limit and no audio, yet it is still the one animated format that plays everywhere without a player: email clients, old forum software, README files on code hosting sites, chat apps and documentation wikis. If your goal is a short loop that starts on its own and needs no click, a GIF is often the only option that works in every destination. For anything longer than about half a minute, or anything where sound matters, an MP4 is smaller and looks better.
Typical good uses are a five-second product demo for a changelog, a reaction clip, a UI bug reproduction attached to a ticket, or a looping animation for a slide deck.
What happens when you click Convert
The converter runs FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly inside your browser tab. The first conversion downloads the engine once; after that it is cached. The video is never sent anywhere, which matters if you are converting screen recordings that show internal dashboards or customer data.
Conversion is done in two passes, the same technique video editors use for high-quality GIFs:
- Palette pass. FFmpeg reads the clip at your chosen frame rate and width and builds an optimised 256-colour palette from the actual colours in your footage, rather than using a generic web palette.
- Render pass. The clip is read again and each frame is mapped onto that palette with dithering, which spreads small dots of neighbouring colours to fake smooth gradients.
Frames are resized with the Lanczos filter, which keeps text and edges sharper than simple bilinear scaling. Height is calculated automatically from the width so the aspect ratio stays the same. The audio track is dropped, and the resulting GIF loops forever.
Choosing frame rate, width and duration
GIF size grows roughly in proportion to frames multiplied by pixels, so the three settings work together. The defaults are 10 fps, 480 px wide and a 15-second cap.
- Frame rate (5, 10, 15 or 20 fps). 10 fps is enough for screen recordings, slides and most talking-head clips. Use 15 or 20 fps only for fast motion such as sports or gameplay, and expect the file to be 1.5 to 2 times larger. 5 fps gives a deliberately choppy, flip-book feel and the smallest files.
- Width (320, 480, 640 or 800 px). 320 px suits chat reactions and mobile, 480 px is a good middle ground for blog posts, 640 or 800 px is for screen recordings where text must stay readable. Picking a width larger than the source video upscales it, which adds size without adding detail.
- Maximum duration (5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 s). This cuts the GIF after that many seconds, counted from the start of the video.
As a rough guide, a 10-second clip at 480 px and 10 fps lands in the low single-digit megabytes for simple footage, and can be several times that for noisy, detailed video with lots of camera movement.
The duration limit always starts at 0:00. To turn a section from the middle of a video into a GIF, first cut the clip to the part you need, then convert it.
Getting cleaner, smaller GIFs
The 256-colour limit is the main source of ugly artefacts. A few habits help a lot:
- Prefer flat, static footage. Screen recordings, animations and clips shot on a tripod compress far better than handheld video, because unchanged areas cost almost nothing.
- Avoid wide gradients. Skies, soft lighting and blurry backgrounds turn into banding or visible dither noise. Cropping tighter on the subject usually helps more than raising the frame rate.
- Shorten before you shrink. Cutting a 15-second clip to the 6 seconds that actually matter halves the file with no visual cost, while reducing width hurts readability.
- Hide your cursor in screen recordings when it is not part of the demonstration; a moving pointer changes pixels in every frame.
If a platform still rejects the file for being too large, run the result through the GIF compressor rather than converting again at a tiny width.
Inputs, limits and memory
The tool accepts MP4, MOV (including iPhone recordings) and WebM files up to 500 MB. Because everything happens in your browser's memory, the real limit for output is your device: long clips at 800 px and 20 fps can exhaust memory on phones and older laptops. If a conversion fails, reduce the duration or width first. Processing speed depends on your CPU; a short clip usually takes seconds on a laptop and noticeably longer on a phone.