A Skyrim Video Editing, Gif Making, and Uploading Tutorial

[Guest]

This is a repost of the tutorial on my blog for archive purposes:
http://www.loverslab.com/blog/607/entry-3776-a-skyrim-gif-making-tutorial/

 

Feel free to comment on this thread or the blog =]

 

Skyrim Gif Making Tutorial

 

Hi there LL, this is my first official tutorial/guide on this site, please be gentle   
This isn't necessarily the best way or the only way to make animated gifs from skyrim video clips but this is my way of doing it. It involves using Fraps, a third party program called Virtual Dub, and two websites, should all be free to use and easy to setup. Hopefully the instructions aren't too vague or too wordy, but I did highlight all the tldr for each step, hope it helps anyone interested in this stuff! I'm bound to have made some mistakes here and there, despite that, I really wanted to share this because I love gifs and the more user made ones, the better  ! Now get to it!

 

Things you need for this tutorial:

 

1. Fraps (http://www.fraps.com/download.php) ~ Fraps 3.5.99
2. VirtualDub (http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/) ~ 1.10.4 (64-bit) version
3. x264 VfW codec (latest 31145) (https://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/) ~ exe file
4. http://ezgif.com/ (A browser that can run this website, ex: Chrome)
5. https://imgbox.com/ (Suggest this site for hosting your gifs, ie: make an account)
*** I'm using Windows 7 64-bit system for this tutorial ***

 

Step 0: Installing VirtualDub and codec
One time installation instructions:

You’ll need Fraps to record your short video (usually in avi format) so install that. I’m sure most you already own it or have installed it before, it’s pretty straightforward. Recording with it produces a really large file size, hence we need program #2.

 

The next program I use is called Virtual Dub. It’s a free program that is mainly used for quick video editing, cropping, resizing, etc. (lots of other features you can try too if you like). Mainly, I use VirtualDub and its codec to compress large avi files into smaller ones, usually 100-500mb -> 1-2mb (No Joke). This will help us make gifs with a small file size.

 

Let’s download VirtualDub and the codec:

 

Follow the links I posted above to download the correct versions of fraps, Virtual Dub and the x264 codec (1-3).
1. Follow Fraps installation instructions until finished.
2. Virtual Dub is a zip file that you can extract and start using it without installation.
3. Finally, the x264 codec should be installed after extracting Virtual Dub. Keep clicking next, I agree, check all the boxes, and install in default program files.

 

To check if the x264 codec has installed properly, go to the folder where you extracted VirtualDub and open VirtualDub.exe. Then go to Video -> Compression. At the bottom should be the new codec “x264vfw – H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec” as shown below:

 

Once this shows up, you are done with the installations. Now for every future gif you make, you can just follow steps 1-4 =]

 

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Before we start, the goal in this tutorial is to make optimized gifs under 10mb for fast loading times. But using these programs you can choose to make high quality gifs with higher file sizes as well, I leave that up to you!

 

Step 1: Recording the video with Fraps

Our goal here is to make gifs under 10mb. So try to pick a smaller resolution while recording with fraps and/or also record a shorter video.

 

You can pick any resolution really but Gifs are hardly 1080 x 1920. So, I personally record Skyrim vids in 1360 x 768 resolution to save file size and time. You will get opportunities in this tutorial to resize the video/gif later if you are unsure what size it should be, so don’t worry too much.

 

Gif size is also dependent greatly on video length, so try and keep your video under 10 seconds max. Gifs running 2-5 seconds can be bigger in dimension, but gifs running 6-10 seconds will need to be shrunk to smaller dimension.

 

 

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Step 2: Using VirtualDub and compressing video

We will be making an animation-loop-gif for this tutorial. (For this, you will also need to record an animation in skyrim that repeats). Here is an example video I recorded:

Now, open up your video avi file that you’ve recorded with Fraps in Virtual Dub. There are several edits you can do to your video.

 

Resizing 
You can resize the dimensions of your video by going to Video -> Filters, click the “Add…” button scroll down and find resize and press OK. You can then adjust values directly (Absolute) or percent scaling (Relative). Our codec needs the dimensions to be even numbers so make sure under Codec-friendly sizing, you select “Multiples of 2” as shown below:

Cropping
You can crop out parts of the video by going back to Video -> Filters, select the resize filter (from above) then click the “Cropping...” button. You can move the borders around to crop parts of the video out. Our codec needs the dimensions to be even numbers so make sure the final cropped size is “even x even” (Ex: 720 x 480) as shown below:

Editing Length
You can decide the start and end frames of a video using the small arrow key buttons at the bottom bar. This lets you select what to keep and what to discard in your video clip. It also lets you align looping animations so that they appear continuous (make sure the start and end frames are similar) as shown below:

Compression
After you have a satisfactory video clip, it’s time to make sure the compression is working properly. Go to Video -> Compression. Make sure the x264 codec is selected, click configure. In the new dialog box, most things can be left to default values. However make sure Zero Latency is checked on and under Rate control, it says “Single pass – ratefactor-based (CRF)” with a ratefactor value of “17.0” then press OK as shown below:

The program should remember this for next time.

 

Saving
Finally, to save your video clip into the compressed version, click File -> Save as Avi, select a folder and a name, and press save. If the dimensions are even numbers and everything else is good, it should save without an error message as shown below:

Side note: The output format of your edited video clip is displayed to you on the right side as shown above. The output in my case is cropped, and scaled 110% bigger.
Now you should have an edited video clip that is cropped(if you want), resized(if you wish) and compressed from 100s of mb to anywhere between 1-3mb.

 

 

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Step 3: Turning video into gif format

Compressed vid files are easy to turn into gifs. You can use a lot of photo editing programs for this such as photoshop, gimp etc but I found a pretty decent website that manages the job faster: http://ezgif.com/

 

Video-Gif Conversion
First thing to do is to go to the “Video to Gif” tab and click [Choose File], select your compressed video clip and click upload. This should produce a screen such as this:

Time to set up a couple of values:

 

Start time: should be at 0
End time: should be anything longer than your clip (I usually just put in 10 seconds)

 

Size: Original (up to 960px) this is the max height of your gif (pretty big in fact)
Frame rate (FPS): 20 (this is the maximum value)
Method: legacy (old)

 

Then click [Convert to GIF!]. This will take a short while to convert your file into gif format. The website gives you the file size, the dimensions and the framerate for each conversion right underneath the gif.

 

Optional Stuff
You can use crop and resize tools to edit the gif the same way Virtual Dub edited the videos. Both of these options will reduce file size.
You can also speed up the animation using speed and add effects, but these might increase file size.
Options shown below:

Side Note: The file-size of the converted Gif is entirely dependent on the dimensions of your video, the duration and if it has been compressed or not. Usually, anything from 10mb-50mb is possible. You want to your converted gif to be less than 30 mb at this point. Otherwise It will not compress to under 10mb. So if you are over, try resizing and cropping some more!

 

Optimize
Clicking the Optimize tool will take you to a new page. There is a drop down menu that you can choose to pick how you want to compress the gif further. Usually the only ones I use are either “Lossy GIF level 30 (slight)” or “Lossy GIF level 80 (medium)”. These will greatly reduce your gif file size but they add dithering/noise. Using Level 30 has very minimal effect on the gif but with great compression results so I default to this. So use Level 30 first, however, if the gif is not under 10mb, then use Level 80. The goal here is still to be under 10 mb:

Sometimes you don’t need to optimize, because your file is already under 10mb. However if you want it to load faster, try to get the size as low as possible, or if you want to preserve quality then get it around 9-10mb range.

 

After that you can just right click and save the gif or click the save tool, it’s done, you have your gif!

 

 

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Step 4: Uploading gif and posting on LL

There are a lot of hosting sites that work for LL but gif-wise I started using https://imgbox.com/ it’s very easy to join and can host gif files that play under spoiler tags. The only limit is that files must be under 10mb size, which is why our gifs are optimized. This also keeps you in the habit of making smaller sized gifs which is good for everyone =]. Sign up and upload a gallery such as this:

Lastly to link the gifs to LL, first open the imgbox gifs in new tab: You should get a URL like this: https://i.imgbox.com/pyGEkmwU.gif (Note that the url reads “i.imgbox”) Copy that URL and go to LL reply toolbar, click the Image icon and paste the URL in the bar and press ok. This will insert your gif directly into the thread:

Make sure to surround it with spoiler tags!!!

 

And there you have it, a complete guide on how to make your own gifs!   
This is what the final gif looks like:

 

 

Once you get the hang of doing this, you can really take off with making gifs super quick, takes only 10-20 mins to convert a handful and post em. Hope you guys found this tutorial helpful / learn something new maybe. Comments or any clarifications are of course welcome. Lemme know how I did on my first tutorial, might be a bit wordy but I'm glad if you stuck to it till the end. Cheers!

 

Thanks to spoons666 for getting me into making a tutorial in the first place!
Also thanks to this forum thread http://www.wcreplays.com/forums/showthread.php?t=113891 for teaching me the ways 

 

~ Amply / Render_Reindeer

[Guest enip]

I would never recommend Fraps. Not even Bandicam. OBS Studio is far better.

[Guest]

I would never recommend Fraps. Not even Bandicam. OBS Studio is far better.

 

OBS actually doesn't record in any other format other than .flv or .mp4 and does not load in many video editing programs like Adobe Premiere or VirtualDub. It would just require an extra step in the tutorial to convert OBS-recorded video into a compatible video format for editing. I mean people can obviously prefer to do this, but this tutorial tries to reduce steps to a minimum. Thanks for the feedback!

[meneraing]

Hey mister thank you for this tutorial! I've made my very first gif now ^.^

Spoiler

 It doesn't have a perfect loop but i'm happy with the result. Thanks again!