Photobucket emailed me this past week to tell me my account is at risk of being deleted for inactivity. I log in to find out that there is now an arbitrary limit set and a large number of my icons are no longer accessible here.

How much free space does Photobucket offer: 250 images (I have 1,050 images uploaded)

Photobucket offers 2.5 GB of free space, of which I've only used 20.11 MB, yet has decided to also impose a limit to the number of images. Ridiculous.

At least Photobucket gave me the option to download all the images. I hope to eventually upload them elsewhere, but I don't know how soon. Even though I haven't made icons in years, I still want to keep my posts as a bit of a time capsule.

Applications

• Photoshop CS5 Extended (CS3+ should work)
• QuickTime X (OS X 10.6+ only) or QuickTime Pro
• Perian (allows QuickTime to play various video formats)

* Theoretically the concepts in this guide should translate to Windows. However, my knowledge of Windows is very limited so I may not be able to help with any questions/problems that are Windows related.


I. Preface
Instead of screen capping a scene from a movie or television show to make GIFs, I personally like to use video because of its accuracy in capturing a moment and I find it to be less time consuming. I mainly use 720p or 1080p MKV video files when I make GIFs because of their image quality. Unfortunately MKV files will not open in Photoshop so they will need to be converted to MOV/MP4/M4V/etc. If the file is already Photoshop-ready, you can skip to the next part if you wish or you can trim your MOV/MP4/M4V/etc. file as well.

( ✄ ✄ ✄ ✄ ✄Collapse )

- This guide is very image heavy.
- Click on the screen caps to see them in full resolution.
- Questions/comments are more than welcome!

This guide is for the newest version of VLC (1.1.9) for Mac users. You will no longer have to use the old version of VLC (0.9.9a or below) to auto-cap. Just follow these simple steps!

( ✄ ✄ ✄ ✄ ✄Collapse )