There are moments, usually very short, 2-3 seconds let’s say, when a GIF is a lot more suitable than a record.
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You are right about GIFs being a ridiculousy inefficient file format. Personally I try to make my GIFs not much bigger than 20 Mb. I think with today’s connections speeds and capacities that doesn’t put too much of a strain on the servers. But, compared to the tiny little snippet of video containd within, the file sizes are beyond good and evil.
There’e several things I enjoy about making GIFs.
And yes, the fact that they play automatically is one part of it.
It’s a challenge to find the little special, sexy, funny or just beautiful moments in the hours and hours of bland webcam footage. And then, if you have found such a moment, you want to present it in the best possible way. For me it’s very much about the right framing. For the most part, the full-format wide-angle imagery of VHTV cams is just aesthetically unappealing. Which aspect ratio is the best to show this moment in a nice image composition? How close exactly do I want to zoom in? Which body parts do I want to include in the image, which can I do without? Maybe rotate the image a few degrees so it fits the frame better? Touch up the colors, add some more contrast or saturation? And so on and so on.
And one more challenge, when the opportunity presents itself, I like to make a more or less seamless contiuous loop. Often the most time consuming part is to find the exact best frames to start and end the loop.
But it is not that time consuming. Formatting a gif takes maybe a couple of minutes. I used to do much more complex video edits which often enough took me several evenings to edit one video. These days I find it hard to muster the enthusiasm for bigger video editing projects.
A GIF is just a quickie on the side.
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Thanks for even answering.
But the arguments don’t convince me enough to create GIFs myself, because the advantages of video are far more compelling.
Even if it’s only 5 seconds, I can just as easily zoom in and define areas for a suitable format, e.g., 360x480, and set the appropriate quality, e.g., 500 kbps or so, and I can make the moment funnier or more emotional with suitable audio.
Multiple cameras of the same moment side by side at the same time are just as easy to do.
And the stream player also has a loop function.
Additionally, the viewer can save individual frames from the video.
And for shorter things… to post 3 to 9 images for a special moment, maybe several sections in one image, are the better option for me.
But thanks again anyway.
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Everyone has their own preferences.
And that’s what makes it exciting, I think.
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JMO, but the BEST possible way to present any moving picture is with a video. If for no other reasons than quality and file size, a video ALWAYS beats out a GIF. GIFs are so last decade.
Enormous file sizes, takes forever to load, 256 colors, no audio, horrible, horrible quality in almost every case, etc. Sooo last century, literally.
In more than 4 years on this forum, I’ve seen one GIF that rivaled the quality of a video. It was posted by Jawis in the photo editing topic. It didn’t solve the file size problem, but the quality was unmatched for a GIF.
Again, JMO.
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even last millennium 
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Quality is not really the deciding factor here, and our source naterial is not of great image quality to begin with, anyway.
Through their looping nature GIFs offer themselves to get creative with short clips in some ways that videos are not good at. Who enjoys watching a 5 second video?
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.
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I’m not saying anything against videos, in fact I’ve done my fair share of trying to elevate VHTV footage through video editing. GIFs are just a somewhat different creative medium. It may bot be for everybody, just as I don’t have much interest in editing still photography.
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Quality should ALWAYS be the deciding factor, the number one, top deciding factor for any type of media.
Danny Boyle shot 28 Years Later on an iPhone. He could have used much better cameras, it was a creative decision. It’s a very good movie.
Gracious dressed up dancing. I am impressed. 
There are quite some norwegian artists for example, in this case singers, that produces quite a lot of creative youtube videos and so on. Only by using their mobile phone in that process and nothing else. 
I’ve heard of people doing that. An iPhone has pretty decent cameras.
Christopher Nolan disagrees. 
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it’s very easy to make it 50 seconds (10x the moment) with a third or less of the filesize of the 5 second GIF. and even more interesting with audio.
and when 10 times is not enough…there is the ‘enless loop’ of the stream-player that one can use.
I tend to agree with Julio’s. With a 5- or 10-second GIF, you capture exactly the crucial scene. The seconds before and after are usually uninteresting and just drag out the video, whereas the crucial 5 seconds pass so quickly that you might not even notice.
And why watch a 50-second video on a loop?
Regarding the sound, it would be pointless for a 5-second video, especially if it were to be played on a loop. I seriously prefer a GIF.
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thats why i said: it’s easy to repeat it in a video 10 times
when the same 5 second scene 10 times (=50 sec) is not enough
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I also think GIF is more of a “moving photo” and video is a whole little story with plot and so on 
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Testing another format. Do you guys see this animation? This is a webp file. It is tiny by comparison.
@Celestino230782 this seems to be working great, if Shotcut can export this, Filmora should do so, too. In Shotcut I have to activate the loop function in the advanced export settings.
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Yes, our videos here all have great plots.
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a current example 800x600 same file size.
if you want to see the GIF displayed in that size, I (you) need to open it in a new tab.
quickly created video
in this case 34 sec. 2 times. use the players endles loop if it is not enough.
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