Does anyone know of a free video editor for Windows that allows me to drop gifs into the timeline and treat them as normal video? This isn’t exactly a high-demand feature so I’ve been having trouble finding anything. I know Windows Movie Maker does this but the program itself is a little painful to use. I’m just making a silly video. Any help would be appreciated.
I think Wax will do it, but may be lacking in some other feature or usability you need.
You might be better off batch-converting your GIFs to BMP (assuming WMM handles these better), or using something like VirtualDubor SSMMto create short clips of each GIF, so you can treat them like other video footage.
Ah, well in that case can anyone recommend a free video editor? I don’t need anything fancy but flexible options for text overlays would be good.
PS Wax doesn’t support gifs.
Sorry about that - I thought it did, but I was looking at a Google summary of a thread in their forum, possibly complaining that it doesn’t support GIF.
Dunno about a free, decent video editor for Windows - they’re pretty few and far between - there’s one named VideoSpin listed in thisWiki page that looks promising, but I haven’t tried it.
Edited to add:
I do quite a bit of amateur video editing myself, mostly using a EditStudio (commercial, no longerf availble - but I got it free on a magazine cover) - if you’re working on a tight or zero budget, there is very often a need to fiddle around with two or three different programs in turn, to get the end result you need - for example, first converting the images to a format that is supported by your editor, or editing the footage first, then using a different program to overlay text and titles.
Ah yes, the old working three programs simultaneously tango. I often end up doing it with my expensive proprietary software that I am actually good at using, ha ha ha… ha. Ha. I guess my lack of experience is also screwing me here since WMM is what I’m most familiar with (from making this… also indicative of my skill level) but it can only export in wmv which is pretty much a compatibility dead end (right?). It doesn’t help that the things I need to do (transparent layers, a particular type of text) are kind of useless outside of my project so I have no real way of telling if a program supports them short of downloading and installing them all. Sigh.
Try Pinnacle videospin though after a month you can only work with wmv (my solution was to download formatfactory) though I liked (loved actually - effects out the wazoo) the program enough that I ended up paying the 10 euros to get codecs to process other formats.
I used Avidemux and as another poster said VirtualDub. Both are excellent.
I thought it WMM would export to various other formats in an AVI container too.
Eh, maybe the old versions did, but the one for Vista doesn’t even ask you.
Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I’ll give them a try.
I would use VirtualDub, combined with AVISynth for the overlays and “effects”. However, if your video editing experience is mostly with WMM, you won’t like this solution. It gives you much more control than WMM, but at the expense of a much steeper learning curve.
WMV is a compatibility dead end. But for what you doing, it may be a relatively acceptable tradeoff for the user-friendliness of WMM. And you can always re-encode (with some quality loss) to other formats after you have “produced” in WMM.