I’ve been playing with making animated GIFs from old footage I have lying around.

It turns out that GIF is a terrible “video” format and making them high quality with good loop points while keeping sizes under control requires a bunch of interesting aesthetic and technical tradeoffs (for example, if you grayscale you can discard a bunch of color bits). There are probably savings in duplicating frames using timing metadata for shots that are more still.

That clip is 120 frames, which I think is a fun number because you can use video shot at 30fps to get there in four seconds or “film” shot at 24fps to get there in five.

I’m doing these in Photoshop, but it would probably be better to take a small slice of what I want in a proper video editor with scrubbing, get the loop points right, maybe apply some adjustments, maybe even export it as an image sequence, and then construct the GIF in an image editor or standalone app.