How to convert a video to a GIF in your browser

The converter is a button at the top of the studio. It accepts MP4 and WebM files up to 100 MB and roughly 30 seconds long. Those limits are not arbitrary gatekeeping — every sampled frame has to be held in browser memory while the GIF is built, and a long clip at full resolution will exhaust the tab before it finishes.

Once a file is chosen the dialog reads its dimensions and duration so you can see exactly what you are working with before converting.

Drag the start and end handles to pick the section to convert. This is the single most effective control in the dialog: a GIF's weight is roughly proportional to how many frames it contains, so halving the length halves the file. Most memorable GIFs are two to four seconds.

Source video is usually 30 or 60fps, and GIF does not need anything like that. 10–15fps keeps motion readable at a fraction of the frame count. Drop to 8fps for a deliberately choppy, classic-GIF feel; go to 20fps only when fast motion genuinely falls apart at lower rates.

Frames are sampled evenly across the trimmed range, so lowering the rate never changes the playback speed — it just uses fewer pictures to show the same action.

Output width is the other big lever. Halving the width quarters the pixel count of every frame. 320–480 pixels wide is the sweet spot for chat apps and forums; anything over 640 is rarely worth the size penalty for a GIF. Height follows automatically to keep the original aspect ratio, so nothing gets stretched.

Conversion runs locally, so speed depends on your device — a few seconds on a desktop, longer on a phone. When it finishes you get the GIF straight to your downloads. On iOS the system share sheet may appear instead of a direct download; saving to Files from there works normally.

Instead of exporting straight to GIF you can import the sampled frames onto the timeline. Each one becomes a real frame you can draw on, so you can rotoscope over footage, add captions that follow the action, highlight something in a screen recording, or hand-tint a few frames.

There is a matching option to resize the canvas to the video's dimensions on import, which avoids letterboxing or cropping when the clip's shape does not match your current canvas. From there it is the normal studio workflow described in the frame-by-frame guide.

A file the browser refuses to decode is almost always an unusual codec inside an MP4 container — re-saving it from any video app usually fixes it. If the tab runs out of memory, trim harder, lower the frame rate, or reduce the output width; all three reduce peak memory as well as file size.