How to un-animate an animated GIF

self

[rudy45]

A poster here graciously reminded of www.m1911.org, which contains an animation of how a 1911 operates. I would like (if possible) to do away with the animation and show simple "still shots." Is there a way (once I copy the gif file to my own computer) I can separate out the various images that make up the animation? Or must I write special code? Thanks.

[kenth]

You should be able to download a gif animator from a shareware site, or if you have something like Paintshop, it usually comes with an animator. You can use it to break down the gif to the individual images. Or, heck, email me the gif and I'll send you back the individual images.

[jurroppi1]

you can get irfanview and extract all of the frames from the animated gif as singular images... go to The IrfanView Home Page to download it - free for non-commercial use!

[rudy45]

THANKS.... I just downloaded the program and extracted the GIFs from the animated file. Thanks so much, I appreciate it.

[jurroppi1]

happy to help, glad it worked out for you! Incidentally, the help file in the program is pretty darned good too...

[Sirc_Valence]

Can someone GIF 'Hollaback Girl' by Gwen Stefani at 2:46-47 and 3:02-06??? PLEASE =)

You can find the video.msn.com
Just do a video search of "Gwen Stefani" there.
('What You Waiting For' is the better musicvideo, btw)

[jurroppi1]

I found the video in question, but I'd need to either pay to download it, or do a video capture of the whole thing and process it. At this point, the video is small, and pretty underwhelming in quality. So, I doubt the overall effect would be worth it. At any rate, I didn't really see anything special between 2:26-2:47, but I think I understand why the other section of the video was requested - not bad...

If you can get a bigger/better version of the video and have it hosted somewhere that I can freely download it, then I'd be happy to rip it for you and host the pics for a limited time...

[jurroppi1]

OOPS! Should've read 2:46-2:47, not 2:26...

[sweetliberty]

They usually don't respond when you tell them "freeze." You'll probably have to stun it.

[Sirc_Valence]

I appreciate your effort to supply the technical assistance that I requested. I made it not knowing anything at all about the actual process that it involved, and any sort of reply (ex. "pay me"; "do it yourself loser"; or "that is beyond the reach of my current productive possibilities") would have been fine by me.

My infatuation with the bootyshakin-gwen scene is over now, and you're probably right about the lack of video quality so I won't argue with you over whether the timeframes that I identified or that of 2:50-54 is worth GIFing, but you interested me in the question of how to do a videocapture. I experimented by trying to capture one scene at a time using "Port Scan" and filing images as successive GIF files, like with a flipbook, but I couldn't even catch one frame that way in the first place. Could you tell me the proper way to "process", "video scan" and "rip"?

I'm not very familiar with the way that computers operate, as you can see. I'm still at the basic's of navigation, in other words, turning the thing on and off and going online.

Thanks.

[jurroppi1]

Sure, I didn't mean anything personal by what I said, sorry if it sounded that way... Anyhow. In my experience, which may be somewhat limited here anyhow... I believe you can get some screen capturing utility to capture the portion of the screen (I used to have one somewhere, but would have to dig for it now - I think it's called Srip), and you could run the app, outline the portion of the screen you intend to capture, then when finished; post process the captured video into separate image files as outlined above. I got to thinking about this after I replied to you, and the info I had given before was to un-animate an animated gif into separate frames. If I remember correctly, some screen capturing utilities will also do this with captured video files depending upon how you use the utility to capture the video. Of course, if you were to capture the video and convert it to an animated gif, or capture it as an animated gif, then the process would potentially use IrfanView as mentioned in my earlier posts. Try

[jurroppi1]

DOH! my html didn't work in the last response, so some of it got cut off.

I meant to tell you to try www.freewarehome.com - you may find a freeware utility for screen capturing that will do this, and everything there is freeware. I don't have any experience with a utility called Port Scan for video capture. I'm used to hearing that in reference to networking and hacking, so you've got me a little confused there... I'll go do some digging for screen capture utilities and report back if I find anything of use.

Good luck to you! I'd be interested to hear how this all turns out. Also, I'd be interested to hear from anyone with better ideas on how to do this, or corrections to what I've stated...

BTW, I did like what I saw in the later frames of the video...

Sorry about the multiple posts.

[Sirc_Valence]

I used the term "Port Scan" because I remember seeing it on the keyboard of a laptop that I was borrowing for a while. Maybe it depends on what kind of computer you have. On the laptop that I am using now it reads "PrtSc" with "Sys Req" in small font below it on the same key. It's around those F1-12 keys which I know nothing about.

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of the freeware.com site, I'll add it to my links for future reference. Webopedia.com, which you might know about, is a good resource for looking up computer terms.

[jurroppi1]

Actually, the "Prt Scr" key is a print screen key as far as I ever knew. No matter... What the PrtScr key will do is capture the whole screen at one point in time (the desktop and anything displayed therein), and capture the contents of the current active window at one point in time when used in conjunction with the alt key (Alt+PrtScr). The contents get sent to the clipboard (where all things go when you cut and copy, and where all things come from when you paste).

Any window whose title bar is the active color (medium blue by default on most windows OSes), is an active window. You can only have one active window at a time, and other windows that are inactive will have a slightly lighter shade of blue in the title bar (again, this assumes default settings). You can check your windows appearance settings by going to Start> Control Panel> Display> Themes Tab (if you have an OS that uses themes like Windows 98 and above).

I did find two relatively cheap utilities that sound like they will work, I have used both at some point in time... Hypersnap DX, which is the one I'd recommend, and Snag It, which I don't remember all that well. I only recommend Hypersnap DX over Snag It because I had good experiences with it in the past...

If you can get the video to play in windows media player, you may be able to pause at the point you want, and use the PrtScr key, then go into an application like IrfanView and paste the contents of the clipboard there. You would have to do this and save each frame separately. You may also be able to do this right from the viewer in IE at msn.com where the video is at, but if you have a membership, I think you can get at a bigger size video and will get better results (the resulting pictures would be bigger, and better quality).

See if that works for you before you spend any money on a screen capturing utility!

Good luck to you :)

[Poser]

I've got an old copy of Animation Shop that came with Paintshop Pro 5 a few years ago. You can load an animated gif and work with the individual frames.