"It's me calling!"

[The MAZZTer]

...so saith the Barracian one.

I've gotten into watching the A-Team now. And just like when I made animated gifs of Stargate, I've made some of The A-Team, of one scene I especially like (well there's one I like more but because it sustains the funny over a longer period of time, it wouldn't make for a small GIF).

Murdock plants the bait - 0.5mb
"It's me calling!" - 2.4mb
Both clips in one GIF. - 3.0mb

I like the bit at the end of the second clip the best where Murdock cleans up.

[Holyman83]

Good job Mazzter!

[Fritz]

Would you mind telling me what program you used to make these?

[Tabris_The_17th]

Neat!

[The MAZZTer]

I used three programs:

MPlayer - http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
Irfanview - http://www.irfanview.com/
UnFREEz - http://www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/

MPlayer is a video player. I used its PNG output codec to dump frames like so:

mplayer <<movie file>> -vo png:z=0 -noframedrop -ss <<time in seconds to start dumping>> -frames <<number of frames to dump>>

I ultimately want GIFs, as that is the only input format UnFREEz (my animated GIF creator) supports, but if I use GIFs or JPEGs here I will lose quality because those are lossy formats (GIF will palettize the images, and JPEG is just plain lossy, you know). So I choose PNG because it's a lossless format.

-vo changes the output codec to png, z=0 sets the compression to nothing (otherwise it takes forever) -noframedrop turns off frameskip (otherwise it tries to "play" to PNGs in realtime and misses frames) and the rest should be self explanatory. I leave off the -vo bits and fiddle around with the ss and frames until I get it playing the parts I want it to dump, then I put the -vo in.

Then I used Irfanview's (an image converter/filterer) batch functions to resize/resample everything to 128xwhatever, and convert to 8-bit GIF.

Then I pulled the framerate for the movie from MPlayer's console output sitting in my handy local Command Prompt window (23.976 FPS in this case), inverted it (~0.042s delay between frames) and multiplied by 100 to get the number of centiseconds between frames... ~4 in this case (you'll see why in a second).

Then I dropped all the frames into UnFREEz. GIFs encode delay times between frames in whole numbers of centiseconds, so I use the 4 I got before.

Then I made the GIF, previewed it in Irfanview, and uploaded it.

Considering all GIF patents expire this month, hopefully there will be some good free tools surfacing soon that can do optimization. Maybe. I'm hoping patents are the reason why there aren't any.

[The MAZZTer]

And now for something somewhat different! (3mb, requires XviD codec, recommended media player for command line power users, grab the "all codecs" download for XviD support)

I just had to share this clip. It helps if you've watched the episode (4x10, There Goes the Neighborhood) up to this point to get it, but I think the little bit here is enough. Face is trying to convince the guys holding him Hannibal is in a house down the street, but of course it's actually rented by drug dealers who the A Team, appointed the Block Captains, busted earlier that day.

I love this show.