#giphy stopped loading?

[dbpiner]

Giphy video to gif

#GIPHY VIDEO TO GIF HOW TO#

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Add “conv” instead of “gif” in the URL bar and select “Convert to GIF.” This is a bit longer, but the result is the same. However, there is another way to open the service. Now you can load your GIF from the browser. If you don’t wish to create an account, open the link in the “Direct Link” row in the new tab. The GIF is ready, and you can download it. A fee-based version contains advanced features and additional advantages. If you don’t wish to spend money, decline the offer. The user will be offered to purchase YouTube to GIF for $10. You can rename the file there, add the tags, hide the GIF from other users, making it private. After clicking “Create GIF,” a settings menu will be opened. The service interface is very easy, and it can be mastered within a few minutes. Here you can make the changes during one or another visual effect. Under the timeline, you will see two rows: START TIME and END TIME for setting the beginning and end of the video.Ī row with additional parameters under the timeline will appear if you click a new effect in the menu. Its functionality is very simple for selecting the video interval highlight it on the timeline at the bottom of the screen.

#GIPHY VIDEO TO GIF PC#

E.g., you can add text with the “Caption” feature.Īny GIF or video uploaded from the PC or taken from YouTube, Instagram, Vine, or other apps can be converted into an animated image. The list of available tools is displayed in the left panel. Select the interval or apply effects, if needed. Instead, add “gif” into the URL bar after «You will be automatically redirected to the service and the required video will be opened in the working menu. The user will not have to enter the service from the tabs or search. YouTube to GIFĪ simple and convenient converter. Now let us consider the most convenient services suitable for this task. They make the point without distracting the user from the main content published on the Web page. GIFs are played automatically, and there is no need to pause or turn over them or switch off the sound.

if the video is not integrated into the page content opened by the user, then s/he needs to go to another website, wait until the portal interface is loading, or perhaps watch an ad.

videos have a regularity introduced by William Wordsworth: the 30% are not interesting, but it is not convenient to turn over the video to the required bit.

sound requires stopping the music or control the volume.

then the video should be turned off if you don’t wish to listen to the sound while scrolling the feed.

At first glance, there are 5 simple reasons to do so: Why GIFs are widely-used and popular?Īny user will rather watch a two-minute GIF than a 30-second video.

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Nobody wants to use professional Video Editing Services with a complex interface and a big deal of pop-ups, because for this, you need to be a professional. Of course, there are many more of them, but we will focus on the most convenient and simple online services. We have prepared the 11 most efficient methods of creating GIF images.

#GIPHY VIDEO TO GIF HOW TO#

How to turn a Twitter video into a gif?.

How to turn a Facebook or YouTube video into a gif?.

How to turn a gif into a video for Instagram?.

How to turn a video into a gif in Photoshop?.

To publish an article on a blog or post on a social network, the following questions are often asked:

#GIPHY VIDEO TO GIF SERIES#

Just prepare a suitable source – image series or video. You can do this yourself using one of the available methods. Another advantage is their simple creation. Animated images allow diversifying and enlivening the text content. GIFs are a real catch for Web developers.

[hornyliverpudlianputz]

The art of making The Monkees

I got an ask recently to do a post on the cinematography of The Monkees TV show. Well. I love an excuse to rant about all things film so here it is! (Thanks again for the ask anon!) To start. What is cinematography? Simply put, it is the art of film making. More specifically, it is all the work that goes into making each shot look exactly the way it needs to in order to convey the “artistic vision” of the director. Things like lighting, framing, focus, camera movement, frame rate, and filters. Everything shot with a camera has it. How does it apply to The Monkees? Well..

The Monkees, having started its run as a typical 60s sitcom, actually didn’t push a lot of cinematography boundaries. (Head is another story, but that is for a different post.) Towards the end of the second season it was starting to play around a lot with editing and writing, but not so much cinematography. That’s not to say the show didn’t have it, like I said everything shot with a camera has some amount of cinematography. So. What I can talk about are elements that The Monkees did use, because it has some great examples of some classic cinematography techniques.

Let’s do lighting first. Lighting is one of those things in film and TV that you don’t really notice unless it’s done badly, or if it’s very, very dramatic. Lighting tells us where to look in the shot, if it’s outside or inside, what the temperature is, and whether it’s day or night. Compare these two shots from inside the pad, facing the window: x x

In the first shot, it’s obviously supposed to be daytime while the other shot is clearly night. How do we know this? A combination of scenic design and lighting. The backdrop outside the bay windows has been changed in the second still to reflect a nighttime view. The lighting in the second shot is also much more shadowy and slightly dimmer. The first shot is very cleanly lit in its entirety, mimicking a room that is lit by a large bay window on a sunny California day. Then there’s this beautiful shot which has some thematic implications x:

Notice the shadows of the harp strings on Peter’s face. That could have been avoided by simply not lighting Peter directly from his right side, which means the fact that the shadows are there is deliberate. This is the point in the episode (”The Devil and Peter Tork” of course) where everyone realizes that Peter has apparently accidentally signed his soul away in order to play the harp. The vertical shadows on his face are not only ominous and unsettling, they also create an instantly recognizable image of bars, as in a cage or a prison.

Later in that episode during the “Salesman” romp we see some great examples of dramatizing the lighting using obvious color and glare. In fact, because of the crazy camera angles, we can actually see the lighting instruments being used on set x :

There’s also some great use of colored lighting for comic effect in “The Audition”, both when Peter has “hay fever” and when he is “sea sick” x

Notice how the other boys are arranged around Peter so that none of them get in the field of the colored light. You can also see some spill over from the light on Peter’s shirt, and obviously his hands are affected when he puts them near his head.

Now let’s talk filters. These can be used on either lighting instruments or the camera itself. The boys actually do a short bit with some of the lighting frames (these include both texture and color filters) in one of the “minute short” interviews, watch here. I’m going to discuss camera filters here, which are essentially the same thing except when used they cover the entire shot evenly rather than affecting only the area hit by the light. (For example, in the above bit with Peter a light filter was used, not a camera filter.)

These are a little trickier to spot as any color filter over a camera is designed to be subtle, but they do use a texture filter in “The Chaperone” and it’s in a really classic way (I can’t get a good source on this gif, but it’s not mine):

Notice how the image is a little “fuzzy”? It’s not because the camera is foggy, here’s a shot from immediately before this (same problem as above, no good source but not my gif):

See? No fog. That texturing technique was very commonly employed in the 60s to “soften” a shot or make the mood more romantic, usually when a very pretty girl had just entered the room and a main character sees her. Here the point being made is that the General is instantly smitten with “Mrs. Arcadian” because he thinks “she” is very pretty. The cinematographer used a camera filter to cue the audience with a technique they would have been familiar with to hammer the joke home.

Camera movement. This covers a few new terms so you get a vocab lesson with examples! A “static” shot is one where the camera is still. It’s not moving at all, it is simply focused in one area and all the action happens within that frame. This and the next type are probably the most commonly used shots in The Monkees. (Like I said, they didn’t push too many boundaries on this front.)

A “pan” or “panning” shot is one where the camera is stationary, but swivels from side to side on a fixed point, usually following a subject walking across a room. 

“Tilting” is doing the same but vertically rather than horizontally. So the camera is in a fixed position but “tilts” up or down to follow something that would otherwise move out of frame.

A “tracking” shot is one where the whole camera moves, usually on a dolly or tracks (hence the name) to follow action sideways. This is typically used in large areas, like when a subject is moving down a street. (In this case, the Monkeemobile)

A “dolly” shot is similar to a tracking shot, but instead of moving the camera side to side a dolly is used to “push in” or “pull out” on the subjects. This is used in place of zooming in/out.

A “crane” shot is one where the camera is physically put on a crane to lift it either away from or towards the subject. This can also substitute for zooming in/out.

This variant on a crane shot was accomplished by putting Davy on the crane with the camera which is both hilarious and cool:

Here’s a behind-the-scenes picture that makes it more obvious x:

Finally there is the “handheld” camera which is exactly what it sounds like. A camera person will physically handle the camera, usually on their shoulder, and track the subject themselves. This is typically gives a jerky, “homemade” feel to the shot. The Monkees uses this technique frequently during romps or in the early episodes during dancing scenes, because the bouncy shot makes the viewer feel like they are being jostled.

Next we have framing and/or focus. I’m putting these two in the same category, partially because they are very similar and partially because I don’t have any good examples of The Monkees actually “using” focus. Focus, firstly, is exactly what it sounds like. Focus determines which object or subject is in “perfect” focus and which are in “acceptable” focus. Obviously this affects exactly what the viewer is looking at in a frame. When the focus is “raked”, it’s visibly changed from the foreground to the background, or vice verse. Like I said, The Monkees don’t really play with focus that much, so I’ll leave it alone.

Framing, on the other hand, is a different story. Framing is also exactly what it sounds like, it’s how ever the shot is “framed” in terms of what subjects are in it. Usually it’s characters who are talking or reacting to events. But framing also includes zooming in/out, and The Monkees frequently used this for comically dramatic effect.

Here, for example, in “Too Many Girls” it’s used as a gag reveal:

Or in “Royal Flush”:

In this bit of course, Mike zooms himself in:

There is also a “tilted” frame, which is different than a tilt shot. A tilted frame is where the camera is physically tilted so the frame is on a diagonal. This is usually used to create a sense of unease or “unreality”. The Monkees use it in “Captain Crocodile” when they do the “Frogman and Tadpole” bit, to emphasize the point that this is completely fictional within The Monkees universe. x

Last but certainly not least, frame rate. The Monkees plays with this quite a lot, especially early on, so it’s a big one to cover. Frame rate describes how many frames (the still images on a film strip) are moving past the “eye” per second. The film standard is 24 frames while the TV standard is 30. (I have no idea why they are different.) Because the industry standard will always be to play the film at a rate of 30 fps, a camera person can speed up or slow down the end result by shooting fewer or more frames. 

This is called “undercranking” or “overcranking” in reference to when film cameras were hand operated with a crank. When a shot is “overcranked” deliberately, you end up with more than 30 frames captured per second of real time. When this is played back at a 30 fps rate, you see the results in slow motion. 

The opposite, “undercranking”, means that you have captured less than 30 fps in real time. When an undercranked scene is played back at a 30 fps rate, the image speeds up. Sound familiar?

Now. Having said all of that I do need to make a point about The Monkees specifically. Cinematography in general is basically the reason that “blocking” exists. (Blocking is essentially choreography for not-dancing, it is worked out beforehand exactly where actors will stand/move within a scene and at which cue they move on.) Blocking needs to happen mostly so that lighting and camera movement can be planned in advance. Lighting especially, shadows in the wrong place can really mess up a shot, but also if the specific type of camera equipment to do a certain shot isn’t on set, the shot can’t be done. The camera operators also need to know who their mark is and how/where they will be moving so they can properly do their job.

This means that physical improvisation is very, very difficult to actually do. Verbal improvisation is no problem, but when an actor is moving around unpredictably it takes a damn good camera operator to keep them in frame. Not to mention the fact that lighting is now a total crapshoot. But, you may say, The Monkees is known for improvisation! Correct. What happened with The Monkees is basically “planned improvisation”. What I mean is, the camera/lighting crew went into the scene knowing there would be improvisation. I assume this was typically employed during romps, but who knows in the second season.

There was an interview (or maybe commentary I don’t remember) where someone talked about Micky letting the crew on set know that he was going to be improvising during that scene. He told the lighting crew to lights the set as evenly as possibly, and the camera crew to be ready to follow him “up”. I believe it was actually “The Chaperone” romp because it’s the only one I can think of where Micky goes climbing around like a maniac. And when you look at some of it, it’s clear that the camera person was having a little trouble following him around.

Watch here when he jumps off the balcony:

You can see when he lands the camera person overshoots slightly and Micky goes partially out of the top of the frame.

Compare to this scene from “Monstrous Monkee Mash” when Mike falls down the stairs, which was likely scripted (if it’s not I am very impressed with the camera operator) x:

The only time that Mike goes out of frame is when his leg gets caught on a step, which was likely an accident. The camera moves exactly to a set point that was probably planned in advance. In the second gif, Mike stands abruptly but remains nearly perfectly in frame. Again, probably because it was planned in advance.

But I digress. Point is, even though The Monkees didn’t experiment too heavily with cinematography in their heyday, they did put it to excellent use both practically and comically.

[ashmoundvid]

(via GIPHY)

[fanficflaneuse]

Life in Black - Episode 2

A/N: Hey lovelies! I know I said I’d update the series every Friday, but this week I just started my master’s and it crushed me lol so, better late than never? I hope you enjoy it. Also, GIF’s not mine, found it on Giphy. 

Index  

Pilot 

Opening Sequence 

Episode 2: The One with the Anniversary 

Words: 1951

Summary: the family celebrates Sirius and Remus’ anniversary. 

Narcissa, Bellatrix and Lucius stood on Grimmauld Place, waiting for the building to stretch and reveal number 12. Sirius and Remus had moved in after Walburga Black’s death and redecorated the house, weeding it of horrible memories.

“Do we really have to do this?” groaned Lucius, “it’s still a good time to bail.”

“Coward,” muttered Bellatrix, who eyed the street uninterested.

“It’s their anniversary. And they were kind enough to invite us, so can you please drop it and enjoy the evening?”

A few minutes later, Regulus Black stood on the other side of the door and welcomed them inside.

“You’re early,” Bellatrix pointed out.

Regulus scoffed. “I live here.”

(REGULUS BLACK) TALKING HEAD

(Regulus sits, legs crossed, on a wooden chair with a red cushion. The walls are covered with some very intricate tapestry, as well as painting, moving and still. The room is heavily decorated with items. The thick rug, in a pattern of red and gold, matches the chairs and the curtains. Behind him, there’s a piano and a bookcase. Musical scores sit everywhere, as well as open books and notebooks and a couple of empty teacups. Regulus is wearing a three piece suit and looks pretty much at ease.)

“I moved in one day,” he says gingerly, “at first it was just for a week, but then I never left. Why would I? I was our parents’ favourite son. It’s Sirius who should be paying rent.”

[Back to scene]

“Salazar, this is tacky. Are you poor? Auntie Walburga must be rolling in her grave,” said Bellatrix as they made their way to the living room.

“Bella! Those are the kind of things you think and not say. Sometimes it’s impossible to live with you,” chastised Narcissa.

“Well, imagine how it is to live with Elio and Oliver,” said Regulus offhandedly.

“Who are Elio and Oliver?” Asked Lucius.  

Regulus stopped on his tracks, utterly mortified as he realized what he had just said.

“Reggie, is that a muggle reference?” Narcissa asked, eyeing him humorously. He looked away.

“Poor baby, what have they done to you,” commented Bella as she shook her head in disapproval.  

The whole family was waiting for them. Andromeda stood up to greet her sisters, as their relationship had gotten a little better with months of almost weekly meetings.

“Happy anniversary,” Lucius said to Remus as he took a seat by Ted’s side. As Andromeda, Bellatrix and Narcissa rekindled their relationship, Lucius found himself constantly talking to Ted, Sirius and Remus. Out of the three, he liked Ted better because he was the most discreet. He could also really identify with Remus, as they quickly came to the conclusion that being married to Sirius was very much like being married to Narcissa.

“Yes, anniversary,” murmured Remus, eyeing his husband with an amused expression.

“I’m here, bitches” said James Potter as he burst into the room.

Sirius squealed and soon he was clinging to his best friend like a koala. The family eyed the exchange wearily, already used to Sirius’ fits of dramatics. What they didn’t expect, though, was Narcissa’s outburst as Lily Potter crossed the threshold. The blonde gasped and stood up from her place, her whole face distorted by surprise and histronism. Soon, both women almost tackled each other.

When Narrcissa and Lily started getting handsy, the room went wild.

“What is this?” Asked Lucius, his face drained of colour.

“Seriously, what’s going on?” said Nymphadora from the other side of the room.

“They’re...they’re kissing very close to the lips?” said Lucius unsurely.

“Are you blind? Your wife is snogging mine!” answered James, Sirius still hanging from his neck.

(NARCISSA MALFOY) TALKING HEAD

“Lily Jean and I had a histoire d’amour back in our Hogwarts days,” she says with a nostalgic smile, “we were young and crazy. We sneaked into each other’s dorms, made out in every hallway. We even had a bucket list of forbidden places to have sex in. Merlin, I miss those days. When did I get so...domestic?”

[Back to scene]

A few minutes later, Narcissa and Lily share one very small armchair.

“You know those are made for one?” Regulus said.

“Reggie,” said Lily, trying to sound motherly.

“You can’t ‘Reggie’ me after you snogged my cousin, Lillian.”

Lily laughed it off and snuggled into her ex-girlfriend. For a while, everyone tried to keep the conversation going. Ted made sure Lucius had his fix of firewhiskey so he wouldn’t have a fit. Sirius and Remus humoured James. Andromeda tried her best to keep Bellatrix at bay.

After the first half an hour of relative peace, everyone noticed how Narcissa kissed Lily’s neck and caused her to giggle. People - namely their husbands - turned uncomfortable. Sirius then set his foot down.

“You two ruined my soirée!”

“Sweetheart,” said Remus as he came closer to his husband, “right now it seems like Bellatrix might not be the only divorcée in the family. The celebration is the least of our worries.”

(BELLATRIX LESTRANGE) TALKING HEAD

(Bellatrix smokes a cigar)

“Divorcée life is treating me wonderfully. I’d prescribe this to Cissy any day.”

[Back to scene]

Sirius looked at his husband like an annoyed child. He even pouted a little before complaining again: “It’s not fair. Today marks 17 years since I realized I had the hots for you!”

“Wait, aren’t we celebrating your fifth anniversary?” asked Regulus.

“Do you really believe we’d serve this lowly chardonnay if we were celebrating five years of marriage?” asked Sirius in disbelief.

“What’s wrong with the chardonnay?” murmured Nymphadora to herself after downing her fourth glass, much to her mother’s chagrin.

(SIRIUS BLACK - LUPIN & REMUS BLACK - LUPIN)

(Sirius and Remus seat in two champagne coloured poufs. Behind them, there’s a royal bed with many pillows and a spread in the same colour scheme. The room is big and airy, with big windows on one side, overlooking the street. The couple have their hands intertwined.)

“We’ve been married for five years, but we’ve been together for sixteen,” said Remus, smiling dreamily at his husband.

Sirius lets go of Remus’ hand and hugs him. “I’m lucky I fell in love with my best friend.”

“I’m not your best friend,” said Remus matter-of-factly.

“What? Of course you are! Who else would my b-”

“James.”

“He won’t see this,” said Sirius nonchalantly.

Remus gave him a knowing look. Sirius proceeded to sit up straight and look straight at the camera. “I love you Prongs.”

Remus rolls his eyes.

[Back to scene]

“So, you are telling me we came here, brought gifts and are trying our very best not to kill each other,” said Lucius as he eyed his wife and Lily, who were blissfully oblivious of the scene, “to celebrate you realizing you wanted to get in Lupin’s pants?”

“It was one autumn day when I saw Moony’s face and said to myself, this is the man I want in my bed right now,” said Sirius dreamily, making his husband blush.

“Who does that?” asked Regulus, rolling his eyes at his brother.

“Someone who enjoys life?” answered Sirius.

“I can’t believe you all went to the wedding - “

“I wasn’t invited,” Bellatrix interrupted

“I can’t believe most of you went to the wedding and don’t even remember the date,” huffed Sirius.

“Bitch, please last year I forgot my son’s birthday. Right, Lily?” asked James, only to be greeted by silence.

As everyone looked around the room, they realized Narcissa and Lily had ditched the party. Lucius looked like he was about to combust and James was on the verge of tears. Andromeda called her cousins and cousin-in-law to an emergency meeting on the hallway.

“Listen here,” she said, trying not to give too much attention to the giggles and moans coming from a broom closet, “if Cissy divorces Lucius, both she and Bella will need a place to live. So either we fix this mess or we share custody of my sisters. Got it?”  

Sirius shuddered.  “Cissa’s ego takes too much space.”

“Exactly,” said Andromeda.

“Alright everybody,” decided Regulus “we’re going to therapy.”

“What did you do to him?” Bellatrix demanded Sirius and Remus.

Regulus scoffed. “I’m perfect. I don’t need therapy.”

“Doubt that,” murmured James. Ted snorted in response.

“It’s for your sister,” said Regulus, trying not to feel offended by James. His statement coincided with Narcissa and Lily coming to the room, disheveled, unkempt and hand in hand.

“I didn’t know Andy and Ted needed therapy,” Narcissa said.

“We have the most perfect marriage, right Ted?” Said Andromeda. Ted nodded stiffly.

“If you need any help, breath once and we’ll take you out of it,” whispered Lucius to his brother-in-law.

(ANDROMEDA TONKS) TALKING HEAD

“Ted’s mother inspired me to enroll in a muggle university. It was hard, being pregnant with Nymphadora and all, but I got a degree in psychology and then a masters  in family therapy. I’m loaded now, all thanks to the wizarding community’s crumbling interpersonal relationships.”

She shifts uncomfortably. “It would be unethical to try psychotherapy on my own family. So we resort on...roasting each other and calling it a day.”

[Back to scene]

Andromeda sat on a chair in the middle of the room. Lucius and James sat side by side on a sofa as Narcissa and Lily shared the same armchair as before. The rest of the family stood behind Andromeda, watching the back and forth between the spouses. Andromeda tried her best, asking questions for them to open up, but they proved to be the hardest people ever.

“Andromeda, I’ve got a minor in psychology, none of your tricks will work on me,” said Lily.

“Fix this, Malfoy,” said James to Lucius.

“So, James,” asked Andy, “how does it make you feel, to see your wife in another woman’s arms?”

“Are you really a shrink? Because I could do better,” said Bellatrix.

James gave his wife a look. She was snuggling Narcissa. “C-confused?” he said almost in disbelief, “distraught? And frankly a bit turned on.”

“I really don’t understand straight people,” Remus sighed.

“Me neither,” said Nymphadora. Her eyes widened when she realized the room had gone eerily quiet and everyone was eyeing her.

(NYMPHADORA TONKS) TALKING HEAD

(Nymphadora sits on her bed, cross-legged. Her room is painted black, the walls covered with frayed band posters and political messages. She has some drawings around, a stringless guitar long forgotten in a corner and a desk full of papers and some pictures.)

“Did I just come out to my family with two careless words? Perhaps. Did I pretend it was a joke? Definitely”.

[Back to scene]

“Listen,” said Narcissa, “we are not wrecking anyone’s marriage. We are happy with our spouses and overjoyed with our children who won’t stop babbling about each other. We decided to be best friends.”  

“Best friends?” asked James unsurely.

“Best friends,” agreed Lily as she kissed Narcissa’s cheek.

Lucius and James exchanged worried glances.

“Pads, Moony, we’re sorry we ruined your night,” said Lily, “we were just excited to see each other after so many years.”

“Bitch, I didn’t ruin anyone’s night. If anything I gave them a show...and a sense of purpose,” she said, eyeing Andromeda, “and just for the record, if I was to divorce Lucius, I’d keep the house, Draco and the peacocks.”

Lucius gulped.

(NARCISSA MALFOY) TALKING HEAD

“It’s good to rekindle old friendships. You discover pieces of yourself you left with them and realize how much you’ve grown…” she smirks mischievously, “bonus points if you find out you never really broke up with your Hogwarts sweetheart and so you’re technically still a couple.”

“I invented side pieces,” she adds, seemingly very pleased with herself.

Roll credits. 

Executive producer: @hufflefluff-writer​

Tags: @gloriousrebelrunaway​

[gifted-burnout-archive]

Codename: Candy

Part Thirteen - Where Is She?

Word Count - 1369

Author’s Note: Why do I do this to myself... Also, God Bless the Jack Ryan giphy account... 🥰

The pair separated quickly, both pulling out their gun and heading back inside, Candy's clicking against the tiled floors, the scene before them was horrific, the entire lobby of the hotel now debris. Candy stopped, turning to Jack and ripping sections from the bottom of her dress, wincing as her should twinged with the action. Jack took the material, following Candy's suit as she covered her face tying the fabric over her nose and mouth.

Gun loaded and ready, the Lieutenant and Jack split, the latter looking for injured persons in the unsteady bar area. His steps were careful, and he called out, looking amongst the bodies that hadn't fallen to the floor below for survivors.

Meanwhile, Candy had managed to get downstairs, pulling her cell out. "Police." She spoke into her phone, as as the power suddenly went out she turned on the flashlight. She heard a noise, rushing over to inspect the ballroom on the right of the lobby, one cry turning into dozens. She took a breath, looking down, and frowning. Her shoes looked... Wrong.

She shone a light on them, and a white powder covered them. She rushed back to the main lobby.

"Jack!!" She yelled out, a voice calling back.

"Candy?! What's wrong?" Jack yelled back, dragging body after body away from the balcony's centre, the stone continuing to crumble.

"Can... Can a nuclear explosion leave powder?" She asked, and Jack didn't respond for a few moments.

"You think..."

"Yes!"

"Nobody can leave!" He yelled back, and Candy turned her attention back to the phone, the operator asking her for a name.

"Lieutenant Jones, I am on the scene of the Mall Hotel incident. We have strong suspicions that nuclear products were used in this attack. First responders NEED to have PPE." Jones yelled into the phone, and the operator began talking again, Candy hanging up. She shone the torch around, the room half lit by fires slowly building.

She let out a cough, walking back to the room where she had begun the evening, stepping over groaning bodies and lifeless ones. An arm grabbed at her leg, and Jones looked down to see the Senator, Jack's friend Bill.

"They... They went that way..." The man coughed, his hands leaving a bloody mark on her leg. She nodded, making her way at a steady pace to the alleyway exit.

Breathing slowly, she opened the fire exit and scanned around, catching a body turning the corner on the Main Street. She followed after them, removing her fabric mask as she did, looking for the black suit. One of the waiters...

As people moved towards the scene, Candy's eyes scanned the crowd for someone walking away. Her eyes locked on the back of a head, and she began shoving her way through the crowd, moving as fast she she possibly could. It was no use, the crowd of onlookers to heavy in flow to move through. She racked her brain for another idea, and gulped, raising her gun into the air and firing three shots. As if a ripple effect, the crowds separated, half ducking from the girl in the purple velvet dress, with one individual starting in a sprint. Candy began running after him, kicking off her shoes as she went, and managing a shot at his leg, the perpetrator letting out a yell.

And, just as she sped up to catch the assailant, she entire body was thrown sideways, and she was tackled down by three cops.

"What the fuck are you doing?!" She yelled, sending a punch that made contact with someone's nose, a loud crunch following. "I'M ARMED FORCES. HE IS GETTING AWAY!" She yelled, trying to get back up, but the cops pinned her down, flipping her over and cuffing her wrists.

"You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will-" One Officer started over the din of sirens and screams, and Candy yelled back.

"YOU FUCKING IDIOTS!" She yelled, the officers grabbing her and dragging her towards their cruiser. A few medics passed by in PPE, and Candy took the chance.

"Listen to me. I'm being arrested for shooting the guy who did this. About 50 metres up, there should begin a trail. Get a sample. Please. Get a sample. My name is Lieutenant Jones, give the sample to Doctor Jack Ryan, he's currently in the building!" Candy instructed as she was shoved into the back seat.

"Officers, surely detaining her is a step too far. She's with the forces-" The medic began, but the officer cut her off.

"You do your job, we'll do ours, this lunatic opened fire on civilians." The officer snapped, and the medic frowned, looking between the officer and Candy, who groaned in pain, the harsh actions the officers used to get her in her car having ruined what little healing her shoulder wound had began. Mueller would be pissed.

The officers got in their cruisers, and the medic went back to the ambulance, lifting a few cotton swabs and a ziplock bag, running up the road to search for the blood the Lieutenant had spoken about, the police driving in the opposite direction.

—

Jack was the first point of contact for medics, coming to the door as someone knocked, coughing from smoke inhalation.

"Sir?" A voice called through.

"Jack Ryan... I'm with the State Department... We need to set up a Quarantine Zone at Washington Memorial..." he informed, opening the door to find a medic in full protective gear. "Did Jones call?"

"She informed an operator that this area may be a nuclear hazard." The medic responded, and Jack nodded.

"From what I can see, it was two small dirty bombs... The powder is, we believe, alpha emitting radioactive material... Where is she?" Jack asked, slumping against the door, his vision going fuzzy.

The fire department entered with extinguishers, the three battalions on the scene quickly putting out smaller flames and lifting bodies onto the beyond.

"Public has to be cleared... Please..." Jack coughed out, a firefighter lifting him out from the smouldering building, onto the street outside. The last thing he could see was police creating borders, pushing onlookers further and further back, and a medic running towards him.

He awoke to the sound of beeping and chatter over his head, and sat up removing the oxygen covering his face. As his eyes did their best to adjust, a hand fixed the mask back in place.

"You need to keep it on Jack." The voice was too familiar, and Cathy stood beside him, Greer sat at her base of the bed. "You got lucky, the smoke inhalation wasn't too bad... We are needing to keep you for a few more hours until your stats normalise."

"Where is she Jim?" Jack asked through the mask, struggling a little with his breaths.

"We don't know." Greer replied, and Jack's eyes widened.

"How could you lose a whole fucking person?! She was in the lower level of the building..."

"She left, the Senator saw her leave after someone." Greer caught him up, "But her phone call gave the Hospital and Emergency Services warning. They are treating sixteen of the seventy guests for acute radiation poisoning." Jack lay back on the bed, running a hand through his hair.

"We have people looking Jack, we'll get Jones back here, and treated." Greer tried to comfort him.

"Lieutenant Jones?" Mueller asked, and the pair looked at her. She cleared her throat. "One of my medics reported her being arrested. She told him to collect a blood sample from the road, give it to you." Cathy explained, and Greer left the room to make a call to the police department.

"There were more than seventy guests..." Jack mumbled, and Cathy looked down.

"Casualty count was high... Thirty or so dead on scene or during surgery." Cathy said, taking down his readings.

"And you're an epidemiologist..." Jack continued. Cathy could only smile.

"All hands on deck... Radiology department has never been so active..." She paused for a moment, "Is this... Are you linked to this, somehow?" She asked, and Jack frowned, looking up at the ceiling and closing his eyes, giving Cathy the answer to her question.

[alitheamateur]

The Grind-Chapter 3

NSFW- Our Colton Ritter has been unleased, my loves. You’ve been warned....

(gifs from Giphy)

The Grind- Chapter 3

Tonight was the night. The big night. Our night. The tell-tale truth for Colton Ritter, and his chances against my stuffy, guarded, heart of glass?

We’d made text plans earlier in the week:

C: What’s your Friday night lookin’ like, Ms. Liv?

L: Take out & a bubble bath at this rate, Mr. Ritter. Unless a better off comes along.

C: Well, I was gonna suggest dinner. But, that bubble bath ain’t sounding like a terrible idea...

L: I think a cold shower is what you need!

C: Ok, ok. I’ll settle for dinner. This time... Pick you up at 7:30 on Friday. Your place.

L: it’s a date!

C: I’ll be on my best behavior.

 I hurried around my now trashed apartment, stemming from the embarrassing amount of time I’d spent rummaging for an outfit that suited me. Colton didn’t seem like the shallow type who preferred a woman who spent over half her life decked in stilettos & a full contoured face. So, I kept it simple, and a bit edgy. Felling as if it suited his gruff, and tough mantra.  Dark skinny jeans ragged at the knees that hugged my athletic bottom flatteringly, and a slinky round neck white t-shirt, finished off with feminine cut black leather jacket. I tussled my hair with relaxed waves, & topped my dry lips off with a swipe of pink lemonade colored gloss. I carefully gathered some essentials such as keys, phone, and tube of replacement lips gloss, and stuffed them neatly into a small clutch. I felt the un-used can of pepper spray tucked into the pouch wouldn’t be necessary for tonight’s outing, so I left it behind to make room for a pack of minty gum. Then, three delayed knocks at the door.

My stammering heart leaped into my drying throat as a shower of nerves rained over me. That feeling that takes you over when nerves, and anticipation collide with the unexpected, and intriguing. I opened the door to find his bulky form so cunningly rested upon the doorway, a toothpick pointed out of his always beautiful mouth. The splintered tip of wood he bounced, and situated with his tongue was more dangerous than a loaded six-gun. The innocent peck on the check he greeted me with took me by surprise as he leaned in placing his hand gently on the back of my head to guide me into him.

“Good to see ya’, beautiful,” his hot breath unleashed into the crook of my neck near my ear, and I could swear his lips may have grazed my sapphire earrings.

Any shyness left in my body dissipated as I instinctively took his slightly whiskered face into my hands, turning his mouth to meet mine, needing another fix of his touch. He let out a breathy hum of satisfaction, and a dumbfounded laugh giving into my kiss.

“And hello to you, too” I reservedly cooed, taken aback by the foreign boldness I had just displayed.

Stepping out into the striking night air, he positioned his hand slightly on my lower back. He’d slid it under the thickness of my jacket, and I could feel the heated Fahrenheit of his smooth skin nearly sweltering through my shirt.  He escorted me down the stairs, and my eyes raised to see what I feared was my chariot for the evening. A matte, jet black motorcycle parked at the end of the stairwell, resting on its’ kickstand beside the painted curb. It wasn’t the “mid-life crisis” saddle bagged type with the wide seat on the back, lined with padded armrests. This was the “dangerous, sleek, sex on wheels” edition, fit for a king.  My usual reserved demeanor awoken inside fighting to keep me from getting on the two-wheeled taxi with him, but, he had stirred something in my being during the time I’d known him. Things I’d usually view as reckless, or foolish, now seemed electrifying, and all the more naughtily seducing.

He glided over to his bike, lifting a helmet into each hand, gesturing me over. “Hope you don’t mind. I know it’s cold out, but with the snow finally melted for the time bein’, I’d thought we’d take the bike & enjoy the night air a lil’ bit.”

I’d never ridden before, but I wanted nothing more in that moment than to straddle the soft leathered seat & swaddle my arms around his muscular back.

“As long as you don’t mind me squeezing the near life out of you the whole way, I’m game,” I grinned.

The idea was riveting, but I couldn’t deny there was a shred of fear on the side. I shook loose the visions of road-rash and semi-truck collusions, and readied to toss my leg over the seat. He walked over to me positioning the scuffed silver helmet onto my head, carefully fastening the strap under my delicate chin, then I felt his heavy hand pat my shielded noggin.

“All set, girl. Gotta protect that pretty little head a’ yours,” he reassured, probably sensing some slight unease written in my reluctant, shifty smile.

He slung his left leg over the iron horse, and I followed suit. Settling myself tightly against his statuesque torso, I let my fingers wind tightly into the gray thermal shirt he wore under his heavy lined Carhartt coat. I could feel the carved core ripple as he reached to turn the key. Before he fired the rumbling, smoky engine, he turned over his shoulder to address me from his helmet-pooched lips.

“You look amazing, by the way, Liv.” He started the bike & a thunder worked up my body as we disappeared into the chilled night.

 I was taken aback when we’d wheeled up to the sushi spot I had dotted over in a conversation we had week or so ago. I hadn’t pegged him for a guy who enjoyed raw fish, but he was definitely the type to pull out all the stops for the lady in his life. As if I had any skeptics on whether he was genuinely interested in me to begin with, I was fairly certain in that moment that Colton Ritter was about to become an incurable addiction in my life whether I liked it or not.

He, of course, left me to do the ordering for the two of us. I played it safe with a cooked roll, & an order of veggies & pot stickers on the side, concluding his eating habits probably didn’t consist of much eel, or wasabi. We spent a vast part of dinner laughing over the waitress of ours that had a very obvious soft spot for Colt, and his dimples. She’d barely even made eye contact with me one time through the meal in its entirety, & managed to spill his drink when she bent over unnecessarily to display her full chest to him while taking our order.

“So, this is what it’s like to be out with the guy who every girl in the room wants to be under.” His face cast a light pink shadow at the compliment, taking a long swig of his beverage to dismiss my observation. But, he had to know it was true. He had to know that every room he entered became his platform, and the crowd took notice of him within seconds. The perplexing shade of his eyes, the way his soft brown hair rested easily across his forehead. The way his stocky shoulders slumped forward a bit with his bowlegged sway. His undeniable command captivated the attention of all eyes in the room, whether he wanted it or not.

“Right now, I only care about the opinion of one girl in the room,” his gaze shot up.

“And clearly you’ve impressed her. She was so in awe of you she spilled water all over our table.” I teased him referring to the over-the-top server who’d been taking care of us, knowing full well his eyes only desired the vision of me.

“Look around this room, Liv. Ain’t a girl in here holdin’ a candle to you.” His armed slid across the table reaching for my now furiously sweating palm.

For a second, I wanted to crawl under the table and fall into a giddy, squealing fit basking in his endless praises. However, the sensible side of my brain alarmed me that those were the words of a man who had spoken to (among other things) a vast history of women in his twenty-something years. Was being another notch enough for me?

“Enough about me, mister. Tell me something about you. Something not related to cage matches, and meal plans,” I changed the subject and stirred the melting ice in my glass.

“Damn, girl. Ya’ can’t put me on the spot that way. Umm.. lemme think.. Well, I work at bike repair shop down on 8th street. I ain’t there much with trainin’ all the time. But, Bruce, the owner, is real cool about lettin’ me get some hours in when I’m hurting for cash.”

You, all greased up, sweating, in a ripped up jumpsuit, crawling under a motorcycle with a wrench in your hand? I made a mental note to find 8th street, and this motorcycle shop first thing tomorrow morning.

“You fit the bill for grease monkey, I guess. You any good with cars? I could use an oil change,” I kiddingly suggested.

“I’ll fix you right up, darlin. Free of charge,” the man winked with a single nod of his head.

“Is there anything you don’t do? The male population thanks you for making them all look like chumps.”

“There’s plenty I can’t do actually. And plenty more that I am good at… But you’ll have to hang around for that. I can’t go givin’ away all my secrets now, little girl.” It seemed more like a warning the way he said it. One I wanted to break, no doubt. But a warning nonetheless.

 “C’mon, got one more place I wanna take ya’ if you’re up for it.”

Take me to the edge of the earth, Colton Ritter.

 We’d driven about 15 minutes from the restaurant, the evening air had cooled drastically as time passed. He stopped the bike in somewhat of a slummy part of town, little traffic, sort of dingy, & parked the bike in front of a dark glass front building. The sign read “Mac’s”, with faded red letters, a set of what looked like boxing gloves hanging from the apostrophe.

“Here’s where the magic happens” he mocked, his crooked grin on full display. I hopped off the bike & he instantly swiped my hand into his, steering me to the door. He clearly spent a lot of time here, judging by the key he used to unlock the paned glass. It seemed he may very well have had the keys to the entire city, and potentially the keys to my bedroom if he played his cards right.

I stood cautiously at the entrance as he briskly stepped across the room the flick the light switches. It was dim even with the countless bulbs, despite being plastered entirely in hospital white paint. A tattered, clearly well used, ring stood centered in the room, stained with the burnt red remnants leftover from many a bloody battle. Backed into the corner hanging from the saggy ceiling, two black Everlast punching bags, secured by clinking chains. I was so distracted in scanning the surroundings, that I hadn’t detected Colton standing next to the bags, shirt discarded onto the cracked, tile floor.

There he stood in all his exquisite glory. Tattoos spread across his very well-defined stomach & chest, and illustrated story I wanted to uncover. His tattered jeans the only lone cloth remaining on his form, only hanging on by the loose buckling is his belt. His once perfectly placed hair now slightly disheveled from pulling the shirt over his head.

“This is where I spend most of my pathetic life, I wanted ya’ to see it. Figured it may help with your article.”

Throughout the growing amount of time we were spending together, the article had honestly been nearly forgotten altogether. I didn’t see him as a work opportunity, or a career advancement any longer, but instead a viscously charming human, who I could never tire of.

 “Right, since this is where, how did you put it? The magic happens.” He began delivering bare handed blows to the punching bag, slowly, clearly pacing himself. Maintain composure, Liv. My knees weakened in admiring him from a distance, and I looked to my feet promptly, needing a palate cleanse from his overdosing sex-appeal. The minimal distance became more than I could stand any longer. I closed the gap between us little by little, but with clear purpose, marching one foot in front of the other toward my prize.  The speed of his punches had accelerated already, causing a light sheen of sweat to glimmer off him, beads trailing over the ripples of his abs like a rocky, Hawaiian waterfall. He halted realizing my closeness, & wiped the perspiration from his furrowed brow.

“Sorry, I’m an ass. This was a bad idea. I dunno why I thought I should bring you here. This is a date, not a session. Let’s go, I’ll get you home.” He leaned over to grab his shirt from the floor.

“Actually, I’m good. Take as long as you need.” I said tucking my sandy locks behind my ear. The look of desire must not have been disguised from my face, because he stood straight & stalked toward me. His eyes looking at me almost like that of starving predator to a vulnerable prey. His hands reached me before his mouth, yanking my womanly, yet, toned hips into him. It wasn’t a gentle, friendly kiss, but rather zealous & hot, no question it’s purpose. He was feasting on my lips like a starved animal.

 Hands flattened onto his scruffy chest, I slightly sunk my nails into him, feeling as if only peeling into his flesh would relieve the pent up pressure between my thighs. My hair was now a tangled knotty mess thanks to him, and my reapplied gloss smeared stickily between our mouths. Suddenly I felt him paw my back side, and within a millisecond I was off the ground. Legs constricted around him, and one of his hands pacing its way to my modest chest. We were moving now, mouths never detaching, making our way to the unoccupied platform in the room. He slid me seductively down his body for a mere second, only to climb through the black ropes onto the mat, holding them gapped for me to join. His manly hands carefully slipped under the sleeves of my jacket, pushing it persuasively off my shoulders, and it’s smooth leather padded weightlessly to the floor.  He was drinking in the sight of me, almost as if he was taking inventory. Memorizing every curve, every dip, every freckle. He teased one finger down my now goosebumped arm, marking his territory with his natural born pheromone. He took a few painfully slow steps into me, closing the gap, our hot centers breathing into each other. I elevated my hands to his unearthly toned arms, and let myself gently outline the dark inkings sprinkled over him. The kiss that he brought to me next, would be the ringing bell to start off the main event.

A metallic taste of blood seeped onto my tongue stemming from my bottom lip he had taken the liberty of nipping between his teeth, and I gasped in sheer satisfaction at the foreign act. I wasn’t a virgin, but I certainly wouldn’t have categorized myself as experienced by any means. I hadn’t been with anyone since moving from Westfield, leaving a semi-steady boyfriend behind. Levi, being the guy I had shared my virginity with, wasn’t the type who knew the needs of his lover per say, but honestly what 17 year old boy did. But then, the second Colton’s hands fondled my sexually inexperienced body, I knew I was in for the ride of a lifetime. His lips had strayed from my panting mouth allowing me to suck in a much-needed breath, then trailed my neck, and were now headed anxiously towards my ear. I felt a slimy suckle on the lobe, causing my legs to nearly collapsing lifelessly beneath me. God, I’m going to soak myself before he even begins at this rate. Colton sensed my frail body giving way, and wrapped his arms around to the lower of my back to steady me.

“Stop me if I’m going too far, babe.” His polite seeking of my permission to continue his pursuit flattered me. His eyes searched mine wonderingly for the go ahead, but without giving a worded approval, I stretched my hand out opening the cold button of his jeans. He gauged my bold reaction, then dropped to his knees, eyes level with my sex. The snug, now nearly wet jeans of mine were being tugged seductively over the curve of my ass, only to be situated right above my knocking knees. He rubbed his nose to the bow delicately placed on the front of my black lace underwear, gifting a gentle kiss treacherously close to the second set of aching lips on my body. The pounding of my heartbeat I heard thudding in my ears was softened by the passing of a honking car horn as the clearly unlocked door of the gym whooshed open.

“What the HELL?” The withering, slightly feeble shadow of a hatted man, stood motionless just a few feet from us.

“Shit, Mac! What are you doin’ here this late, ya’ old bag?!” Colton wrapped a protective arm around me, sending me immediately like a flash behind his colossal form, mirroring that of a human shield to ensure the interrupting man couldn’t ogle my half naked body. Thankfully, this Mac character had turned a blinded eye and was now facing opposite of us.

“I uh, I’m sorry for intruding… Wait, the hell I am, I own this damn place! And I don’t believe this what I had in mind when I copied that key for you, Ritter.”

“I hear ya’, I hear ya’. This is Liv, by the way.” I peeped timidly around the arm on my date who for some reason felt like now was the appropriate time to introduce me to his friend.

“Um, hello.. Nice to meet you.”

“Liv, that’s Mac, he owns the place as he so rudely mentioned. He’s my trainer. And I think he was just leaving…..”

The shirtless fighter began to chuckle aloud at the messy situation, and not soon enough, Mac had finally left us be. Instructing we make sure to lock up, and advised me not to let the “smug little shit” keep me out too late. The heat of the interrupted moment easily rose in sensual temperature dangerously fast as Mac’s headlights became bleak in the distance.

Colotn knelt down again the second we were alone to kindle the fire that was flickering from moments ago.

“Now. Where was I?” Two pointer fingers slid in unison under the elastic waistband of my panties nearly ripping them in half in effort to assault the blooming bundle of nerves between my legs. My head dropped backwards and a groan of bliss bellowed from my chest, reacting to the talented tongue roaming my feminine folds.

Don’t scream, Liv.

Colton’s palms squeezed the rear of my thighs, the pads of his thumbs no doubt pushing bruises into me while he stilled my shaking stance, the speed of his mouth furiously increased.  My hands had wound their way into his hair, tugging his boyish haircut occasionally out of enjoyment. His tongue excited my entrance, trailing erratic kisses over my inner thighs, up to the slightly perturbing bones of my hips. I almost protested, wondering why he’d left me without full satisfaction, but his eyes shifted upward seeking me, and a devilishly grin swiped across his face as two strong fingers slid inside me.

He licked over his puffy, swollen lips, searching for leftover tastes of me on them, and watched intensely as the contorted emotion of release danced over me. My skin set ablaze at the building voltage rushing through me.

“That’s what you want, Liv? You like that, huh?” He whimpered encouraging the inevitable explosion coming over me.

Seconds later, gritted teeth muffling my breathy moans, eyes sealed shut, I clenched around his middle, and index finger, granting his reward for the dutiful worked.

“You are… oh my god, definitely something, Colton Ritter.” I said to him shyly, slightly embarrassed about the climax he had just instigated.

“Oh, that’s just round 1, baby. You’re with a fighter now. You  better be buildin’ up that endurance.” The dark charm of his voice that I grew to obsess over tickled my eardrums. He ushered me to lie down, my back resting on the contrasting coolness of the canvas mat beneath me. The man resembling Hercules himself towered over me, shed his jeans, and tilted his head curiously.

“You are a fuckin’ sight for sore eyes, Liv Elliott. You know that? How did I get you to even give me a second look, huh?” I wished for a bag to cover my head at that very moment. No one had ever sang such lavish approvals of me like that, especially not in the matter of appearance, and it had especially never come from a man who had been visual blessed as he had.  That night, center stage for, what felt like, the world to see, Colton Ritter showed me he could do more than inflict pain with his fighting hands.  

TAGS: @torialeysha @eap1935

[westerosiladies]

Hey everybody, so I’ve gotten messages from a few different people asking how I make my gifs, so I thought I’d post a tutorial. If you any of you have different or more efficient methods, I’d love to hear them! (Warning: this post is pretty long.)

I make my gifs using QuickTime, Giphy.com, and iMovie. I use iMovie primarily to put text on videos (although it’s also useful for adjusting color), which can be done in giphy, but there are fewer options and it’s harder to make text consistent across multiple gifs. (Disclaimer: for this tutorial I used Screencast-o-matic, since I can’t take a QuickTime screen recording of a screen recording.)

The first thing you need to do is pull up the video you want to gif. You’ll want to start recording from a point in the video a few seconds before you actually want the gif to start, and then you can trim down to your actual starting part later. If you’re using youtube, often videos have images floating on top of them, like notes or a little channel marker in the bottom corner. To get rid of these, click on the Settings icon in the bottom right of the video and turn off annotations.

Once you’ve got your video set, open QuickTime and click File>New Screen Recording. This will bring up a small window with a red recording button.

When you click the button, you’ll be prompted to record the whole screen or choose a small section. Click and drag to select the section you want.

When you release the rectangle, a button labeled Screen Recording will appear in the middle of the section you’ve selected. Click on it. It will take a few seconds to disappear. Once the button has disappeared and the stop icon in your task bar has turned black, you are recording.

Return to your browser and play the video. When you’ve played through the section you’d like to gif, press the stop icon in your taskbar. Make sure not to cut off right where you’d like the gif to stop; leave a few seconds of buffer room just in case. When you hit stop, your video will open in its own window.

If you want to add text to your gif, all you need to do now is save it as is. If you don’t want text, you can skip this next part of the tutorial and jump ahead to trimming the video down.

If you do want to add text, open up iMovie and drop your video file in.

Then, under Titles, select a type of text. If you want subtitles, you’ll want Lower (not Lower Third). Otherwise, you probably want Centered, although feel free to play around with how others look. Drop the title above the video clip, then stretch it so it’s a few seconds longer than the clip. iMovie fades titles in and out, so you want to make sure the fade out is past the end of the video. That’s also why you start your video a few seconds before you want the gif to start, so the title fade in is over a part of the video you don’t need.

Select the title and enter your text.

Use the text formatting options to make it look the way you want to. Subtitles look best in a sans serif font (I like Helvetica Neue Bold), I also think they look best italicized. The size you want your text to be depends on how you intent to arrange the gifs in your post. I use size 70 or 75 if I’m going to put two gifs side by side. If each gif will have its own row, then you can go down as far as about 58 without losing readability.

Once you’ve got your video the way you want it, click the button in the top right corner and save your video as a file.

Your video will take a few minutes to export. Once it does, you’ll get a popup notifying you. Now it’s time to trim it down to only the bit you want to gif. Open the video and click Edit>Trim. This will bring up an editor at the bottom of your video.

Drag the yellow edges to where you want your gif to start and end. Your clip should be between 1.5 and 3 seconds long. Any shorter and the gif will cycle too quickly and look funny; any longer and the gif will probably be too large for Tumblr.

Trim the video and save it. Now, it’s time to turn it into a gif. Drop the video file into the giphy window.

Depending on your internet connection, giphy may take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to load. Once it does, click Continue To Decorate. This is wher eyou can use filters or insert text, although like I said before, I prefer to do that in iMovie because you can be much more specific.

If you’re not adding anything additional here, you can go straight to Continue to Upload and click the upload button. Again, this may take several minutes. Give it longer than you think before you assume it’s frozen or stuck.

Once your gif has uploaded, you’ll be taken to a screen where you can share or download. When you click on Media, you’ll see several download buttons. The one you want is Social, which will give you decent quality while still (usually) being small enough for Tumblr.

Once you’ve downloaded your gif, you can add it to your Tumblr post!

Note: If your gif doesn’t move when you post it, it’s too big. Trim your video shorter and try again.

[writing-corner-of-ashley]

Trade - off

(Gif from Giphy)

She couldn’t stop smiling. 

She is currently cleaning her office table by clearing and sorting her papers. She glanced at the digital clock next to her drawer. 11:03 PM. She will be going home with a happy heart.

After organizing her things, she then picked up the empty glass from her desk and proceeded to the pantry to wash it.

The tiniest bit of alcohol dropped straight towards the plumbing; which is a reminder on what transpired awhile ago.

It was one of the best nights she ever had.

She just earned her well deserved promotion at work and of course, this led to a small celebration in the office canteen. She laughed, joked and drank two glasses of liquor; although she was tempted to drink another.

Soon after, it was nearing midnight and her colleagues decided to go home. Once again congratulating her success, they went on ahead - leaving her alone.

Right now, she returned to her office and checked her phone.

She texted her husband and daughter about her promotion and informed them that her colleagues invited her to a small celebration; so she’ll be coming home later than expected.

She only received a text from her daughter, happily congratulating her with emojis and wishing her a safe travel back home. But there is no reply from her husband. 

She shrugged, thinking that maybe he’s too engrossed on his games or had fallen asleep. Her husband always likes to sleep early. 

She shouldered her bag, turned off the lights and locked the glass door using her key. She placed the key in an inside bag pocket and walked down the deserted hallway to the elevator. 

Her heels clicked on the marble floor as she waited for the elevator to arrive. Her smile still playing around her lips, she thought of the promotion. This will help their family a lot and they can even afford more luxuries in life. 

She can buy a new shirt for her husband. She can go shopping with her daughter. They can even go on a family date together at the new Korean cuisine near their home. Her daughter always expressed her desire to eat and cook Korean food. 

The elevator took her down the parking lot where her car is staying. 

During the car ride going home, she turned on her Spotify playlist and energetically bopped her head to the beats of Queen’s songs. There was nothing that could bring down the happiness she’s feeling right now. Nothing could go wrong at this moment, she thought cheerily. 

After parking her car at the garage, she entered the house and was met with silence. She didn’t feel surprised; as this is only a typical night in their home - both father and daughter minding their own business in their respective rooms. It was only during her off days she would see them really interacting. 

She decided to check on her husband first, in order to see the reason of his lack of response to her happy news. 

She walked towards the door and her hands turn the doorknob - only to find out that it is rigid. 

She attempted to turn again but it stayed in place, unable to open the door. She realized it was locked. 

She cocked her head in confusion. Her husband would never lock the door. Usually when she would come home, the door will always open once she turns the doorknob. 

She knocked. “Honey?” she called. 

She knocked numerous times yet there was no sound of rustling nor the clicking of the lock.

Maybe he accidentally locked it and had fallen asleep? She thought, and she fished her phone out of the pocket. 

She pressed the dial icon beside her husband’s number and called - only to be met with ringing. Her husband didn’t picked up.

She bit her cheek. Hesitating, she pressed her ear against the door. She’s trying to grasp a little bit of sound coming from the room, expecting it to be snores. 

However she could hear the distant sounds of a commanding male voice giving instructions, someone screaming, “Let’s go, soldier!” and the loading of bullets to a gun. A video game. 

She knocked louder, thinking that the sounds of a video game probably made him unaware that she’s there. 

“Honey!” she said loudly, making sure he’s supposed to hear it. “Honey! I’m home! Let me in!”

She knocked louder and even used her office key to knock on the door - which was loud enough than any video game sound her husband was playing. 

Unfortunately, that didn’t do any miracle. The video game went on; this time there were sounds of a virtual gun shooting. There were no rustling sounds from her husband nor clicking sounds from the doorknob. The door remained locked. 

She stopped and stared at the door. She then realized something. 

Her husband’s angry at her. 

Her enthusiasm evaporated. The memory of her job promotion, small celebration from colleagues and thoughts of affording luxuries for her family suddenly seemed so far away. 

She turned around and made her way slowly to the living room as her heart became heavy and her bag suddenly weighed tons. 

She sat dejectedly on the sofa and crossed her arms. 

A scowl now replacing the sunny smile she had earlier, she then remembered the times when she and her husband would fight. 

It's always over petty things but they would soon make up; according to the husband’s liking when he wants it. She would just follow suit and understand his reasons.

Whenever they would fight, her husband would take ownership of their room alone and would kick her out. 

The bed in her daughter’s room is too small for them both and she feels her daughter would be uncomfortable with her around. She respects her daughter’s privacy and space. 

There was no other choice but the living room. She would snuggle with the small cushion pillows without any blanket. In the middle of the night, she would hold herself to ward off the coldness but it did no trick. 

She sighed in exasperation and rubbed her forehead. 

She felt the growing frustration inside her. What was his problem now?

Her mind was racing from restless thoughts.

He should be happy. He should be happy for her. She was able to get a promotion! She’s doing great in her job! Shouldn’t a husband feel happy and proud for his wife’s achievements?

Or at least, shouldn’t he be happy that they’re finally getting more money? They can afford other luxuries now! They can buy new video games for him! Isn’t he complaining that there’s little money? Isn’t he complaining that the bills and groceries are getting more expensive? Isn’t he complaining he’s getting bored of his two video games and wanted more?

Her ass worked hard to provide support and to put food on the table. She had hoped for a promotion to be able to answer her family’s desires so that they could be happy. 

And yet, here she is, dropping like a heavy ransack on the sofa - getting ready for a night full of shivering.

She could feel herself getting angrier every moment so she stood up, thinking of ways to calm her down. She thought of making hot chocolate, in which this struck an idea. She would drink hot chocolate if she feels cold during the night with one condition: she would have to wake up from her sleep. 

It’s better than getting cold all night, she thought. She then started to smile again although it doesn’t reach her eyes. At least hot chocolate will comfort her throughout the night, alone in the living room. 

Created by: Ashley Faustine, February 29 2020. (Leap year woot).

[viviyanzop43-blog]

The Biggest Trends In Water Leak Repair We've Seen This Year

The Greatest Guide To Slow Drains

In a bucket, add three quarters of a gallon of chilly water, adhered to by three cups of caustic soft drink. Stir extensively with a wood spoon. The mix ought to start to fizz. Put the combination down your obstructed drain and also leave it to work its magic for in between 20 to thirty minutes.

If you have a severely obstructed drain, you may require to repeat this process. You may be a person whose obstructions maintain coming back whatever you do. Here are the most typical factors. Older homes have older pipes , which are a lot more prone to clogs as well as leaks. Their brittle interior wall surfaces welcome substances that likes to hold on to the surface.

Some Of Drain Cleaning

Then, rather of replumbing your entire house, you just have to alter the piping in those specific locations. Lastly, set up a leakage discovery system to monitor water flow as well as stop leaks. Persistent obstructions take place if your drainpipe plumbing isn't effectively vented. If you have a reoccuring slow-moving drain when you clean your hands or clean your teeth, or if water keeps returning up via the plughole shortly after you've removed your obstructions, inspect to see if your plumbing vents are obstructed.

Constantly attempt to eliminate any physical obstructions before turning to harsh chemicals. But if you do finish up pouring something down your drain, select an extra gentle services before taking out the big Drano guns.

Clogged Toilet Cleanup - The Facts

This write-up might consist of web links to products. We might gather a share of the sales from the items connected to on this page. Learn extra . Is your sink or bathroom bathtub draining slowly? Do you despise making use of nasty, severe chemicals to clean your drains? Lots of house owners turn to utilizing chemical drainpipe cleaners for difficult washroom obstructions.

After the Obstruction is Gone Drain cleaners with chemicals get cleaned right into the drain system as well as ultimately, the regional waterways. These chemicals can damage plant as well as pet habitats and also trigger genetic mutations in their children. The chemicals can outright eliminate delicate species. Additionally, many chemical drain cleaners include lye and sulfuric acid that develop dangerous fumes, according to the UNITED STATE

The Facts About Clogged Toilet Cleanup Uncovered

Just have a look at what a normal chemical drainpipe cleaner does to this sponge in the video listed below, and also you'll never wish to release those chemicals right into the atmosphere again! Industrial drain cleansers also cost a lot even more than all-natural solutions. And also if you utilize a chemical cleaner as well as it damages the pipe (which is not unusual in homes with PVC pipelines), the expense of making use of chemicals to clear out an obstruction could be a lot more.

Little Known Facts About Clogged Toilet Cleanup.

There are a number of inexpensive as well as safe approaches you can use to unclog the drains pipes in your house, with active ingredients you possibly currently have in your closets. Take a look at these 4 reliable means you can unclog your drains pipes while utilizing no extreme chemicals. These are the easiest, most noticeable methods most individuals utilize to unblock a drainpipe.

Rumored Buzz on Slow Drains

If you're (naturally) not comfortable using the exact same plunger in your sink that you use in your commode, we advise obtaining a bettor developed for removing sinks, like this one . Sink plungers are simple to steer in limited areas, and small sufficient to store under the sink so it gets on hand when you require it.

The vacuum that it develops can in some cases move a clog, but a blowback of chemicals can happen if the opening is not completely covered. First, bail as much water out of the drainpipe as feasible to prevent creating a big mess. After that put the bettor over the opening of the drain.

5 Simple Techniques For Slow Tub Drains

An Unbiased View of Drain Cleaning

This will certainly assist to damage blockages and get your drain flowing. If that doesn't function, you can try removing the drainpipe with a straightened cable hanger. Take a cable coat hanger apart as well as push it away vigorously to assist damage up the obstruction. Keep pushing hanger in as well as out till the blockage separates.

by means of GIPHY Drain snakes can be by hand operated or mechanically run with the help of a motor. The serpent has blades that rotate as well as reduce up any kind of blockages triggered by hair, fibrous food material and tree origins. The blades are available in various dimensions, so make sure to pick the suitable size of snake for the drain that has the clog.

The Only Guide for Drain Cleaning

The Definitive Guide for Slow Tub Drains

An additional wonderful natural method to unclog your slow-moving drain is to make use of meal soap and also hot water. If the clog is caused by oil, this technique will function very well. Squirt a great quantity of soap down after that blocked drain. Then pour a frying pan or pot loaded with boiling thin down the drainpipe.

[northshorehealthandfitness]

The Unsexy, No BS Guide to Actually Getting Results

No bullshit.

What follows is what most people, most of the time probably outta concentrate on in order to see results with their health & fitness goals.

Copyright: dorian2013 / 123RF Stock Photo

  1. Stop Chasing Optimal.

What’s the optimal number of days per week to train? What’s the optimal set and rep scheme to perform? What about optimal exercises to include and in what order?

People get so caught up in optimal that they’re often paralyzed to start. Optimal is often equated with “perfect,” and that’s a lot of pressure to put on oneself.

If I had to define optimal it would look like this:

3×52

Get to the gym and do something – anything – 3 days per week, 52 weeks out of the year. It could be your standard 3x per week full-body strength program, three days per week of yoga, group classes, CrossFit, or, I don’t know, Krav Maga naked arm wrestling ring gymnastics.

It doesn’t really matter.

What matters is being and staying consistent.

Shut up and do that.

2. Results Require Recovery

I always tell my athletes that they’re only going to be as strong, fast, and unstoppable as how well they allow themselves to recover.

Recovery and recovery strategies is all the rage nowadays.

Rightfully so: recovery is important.

However, I’ve never seen a more blatant game of oneupmanship of late than people discussing what they do to recover.

The latest fad is people paying money – and a lot of it, mind you – to stand in a cryo-chamber for a few minutes and, literally, freeze.

Cool. <— hahaha, get it? I’m being sarcastic & ironic at the same time.

As far as it’s efficacy, I’ll just drop THIS here and let you talk amongst yourselves.

You might be able to convince me this would be a viable option for Bulgarian or Russian weight lifters who train 3-4 times per day six days per week.

But even that’s a stretch.

Yet, you have guys who’ve squatted 225 lbs once bragging about utilizing cryotherapy.1

“Gotta recover. #YOLO.”

I have a better idea:

Go to bed.

Eat ample calories to support your goals.

Get a massage.

Meditate.

Get laid.

Pick your nose.

Any of those would be a far better option that freezing your balls off.

3. Easy Training is Good Training

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

“Lifting weights isn’t supposed to tickle.”

There has to be a degree of uncomfortableness if you want to see results in the gym.

However, it doesn’t have to be every…single…workout.

Working hard and training with purpose/intent is one thing. (Good).

Not being able to feel the left side of your face is another. (Bad).

A talk I have often with my own clients is the idea of 80% workouts; a concept I stole from strength coach, Paul Carter.

Someone may walk in one day and say something to the effect of:

“Tony, I feel like my last workout was too easy.”

My typical response is something to the effect of:

via GIPHY

Okay, only slightly kidding.

Of course there’s always the chance I was a bit too conservative with loading or the mode of exercise. If that’s the case I’ll adjust accordingly.

Most of the time, though, I’ll reiterate it’s okay to have “easy” workouts.

Easy training is good training.

10% of the time you’ll feel like a rockstar and these are the days the weights fly up.

10% of the time you’ll feel like a bag of dicks and weight you normally crush feels heavy.

80% of the time are your “easy” workouts.

80% workouts are the ones where you show up, do the work, don’t miss reps, and then go the eff home and Netflix and chill (emphasis on chill).

Those are the workouts that matter most.

Refer to Point #1.

4. Miscellaneous Tidbits & Tomfoolery

– Train alongside other strong, albeit supportive people. Find an environment, even if it’s just once per week, where you can be amongst your people; your tribe. It’ll make all the difference in the world.

– If your gym doesn’t allow chalk, you’re a member of the wrong gym.

– More Tiesto…;o)

– Stop wasting your money on detox diets or organic Acai berries fertilized using the shit from a Centaur’s rectum. If you’re not accounting for or cognizant of total calories per day (as it relates to your goals) it’s pointless.

– Drink more water (best detox diet their is).

– Walking is a undervalued and underutilized form of exercise.

– I’m sure I could pontificate longer and muster up some more gems, but 1) I’m hungry 2) I need to go relieve the nanny and 3) I want to hear what YOU have to say.

The post The Unsexy, No BS Guide to Actually Getting Results appeared first on Tony Gentilcore.

from North Shore Outlet - Health and Fitness http://ift.tt/2ge171d via IFTTT

[zanytimetravelenthusiast-blog]

VidViral 2.0 Review And Large Bonus

VidViral 2.0 Evaluation - Are you searching for even more knowleadge about VidViral 2.0? Please read through my straightforward review concerning it prior to choosing to review the weaknesses and also toughness of it. If you get VidViral 2.0 via my link, you will certainly get unique as well as attractive bonus offer plans. I always update my bonuses everyday.

Introducing VidViral 2.0

Top 10 Video Quality Enhancers (Part 4)

6. Corel VideoStudio Pro 2018

Cost: $63.99.

Compatibility: Windows.

The software is simple sufficient that also someone with no previous video editing and enhancing experience can promptly find out how to use it as well as yet powerful enough to allow you to produce 360-degree video clips, stop-motion animations or just routine 4K activity webcam video clips. VideoStudio also lets you resize or chop your clips, while the split screen attribute allows you to incorporate several videos right into one. The collection of over 1500 aesthetic results provides a sea of creative opportunities, while the Lens Improvement devices the software gives can be utilized to enhance the footage you're editing.

The limited quantity of timeline tracks and underwhelming audio editing features make Corel VidViral 2.0 a not likely choice for experts, but if you are just seeking to edit your footage swiftly there are very few much better choices.

7. Lightworks

Rate: freemium, month-to-month permit $24.99.

Compatibility: Windows, Linux, macOS.

Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese or Danny Boyle are simply a couple of world-famous film directors whose motion pictures were modified in Lightworks. What's more, in 2017 the software application won the Emmy Award for introducing digital non-linear modifying. For almost thirty years, Lightworks has actually been among the most effective video clip boosters in the sector, that provides groundbreaking features cinema professionals love.

This video modifying software program lets you do practically anything if you know just how. VidViral 2.0 editing, rich selection of effects or assistance for a broad variety of video clip documents layouts make Lightworks a superb option for proficient video modifying professionals. Despite the fact that the complimentary variation of the software is offered, acquiring a monthly or the yearly license is still a far better alternative if you want to approach your next task professionally.

8. Last Cut Pro

Price: $299.99.

Compatibility: macOS.

The possibilities Final Cut Pro deals are almost limitless. The software program supports mostly all video file styles, its non-linear timeline allows you arrange all type of media documents freely, as well as the color wheels permit you to boost the colors in your videos by merely dragging the mouse cursor. Besides offering support for 360-degree video clips, Final Cut Pro also supplies 360-degree graphics as well as effects.

The video clip editor is built on a 64-bit design, which allows its individuals to service very demanding projects, although it is best to examine the system needs before mounting it on your Mac computer. Last Cut Pro is ill-suited for newcomers to the world of video clip modifying since making use of the majority of its attributes requires an enviable quantity of ability.

VidViral 2.0 Review & Review

Vendor: Harshal Jadhav

Item: VidViral 2.0

Release Date: 2019-Sep-16

Release Time: 11:00 EDT

Front-End Cost: $27-$37

Sales Page: https://www.socialleadfreak.com/vidviral-2-0-review/

Particular niche:

What Is VidViral 2.0?

VidViral 2.0 is a Newest Updated Version of VidViral launched back in 2017.

VidViral 2.0 is a cloud based Video Booster that turns any kind of Video clip(YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Amazon.com s3 or self upload) into a Focus Ordering Masterpiece by adding Focus Grabbing elements to the video which directly talks with the visitor, making them Interested as well as actually forcing them to click on the play button, Inevitably obtaining more views as well as even more Traffic.

Users can include Engaging CTA Texts, Photos, Symbols, GIF's, Timeline Night clubs, Smileys to the Header & Footer of any kind of YouTube video clip or video clip on their disk. They can Make and also Download Completed videos or share on social media sites websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus as well as extra from a cloud based control panel.

VidViral 2.0 Review - Quality & Perks

Innovative remedies to involve with video

You can now add introductions, outros, images, icons, forms, GIF's as well as more to make exciting video clips that involve, delight, and also are a cut over the competition.

Make a wonderful first impression

With many terrific brand-new enhancements-- border frameworks, subtitles, font styles, images, backgrounds, to the newest version of VidViral, you can be assured of making a wonderful perception with your video meme from the second it begins having fun.

New elements included in help you inform your story

With countdown timers, emojis, timeline bars, as well as much more, you currently have a number of brand-new ways to order your visitor's attention, inform your tale and also involve with them.

Videos prepared in simply a few minutes

You only require to spend a few mins to make your video clips spectacular. You can get going immediately and build a library of wonderful video clip content in extremely little time.

Economical solution to increase your Videos Ads CTR

Video clips advertisements might melt your money if it fails to bring in video involvement. This will decrease your CTR. Yet with using VidViral, you can add custom-made headers and also footers and make your Videos standout. This will certainly lead to higher involvement and also enhance your Video clip Ads CTR, causing greater purchaser traffic at reduced advertisement invests.

Choice to choose your video resource

Usage video clips from YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Amazon.com S3 or your own laptop computer or desktop computer to get going with your video memes right now.

Select from a collection of high converting themes

The latest variation of VidViral features 25+ square as well as 25+ upright high-converting templates to make sure that you can personalize your distinct video clips for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest as well as lots of various other sites.

User friendly super-intuitive software application

With a new UI as well as an easy-to-use editor, VidViral brings you loads of attributes at the click of a button. You don't need to be a video editing expert-- you can make a spectacular video utilizing the easy drag as well as decrease attribute even if it's your initial attempt at video production.

Make your video clips go viral on social networks instantaneously

Not just can you keep your video clip meme on your own gadget however you can also publish your interesting video clip right to your social media web page in an immediate. Share your video clips on your social channel, spread understanding, go viral with your video content, and produce unlimited buyer traffic completely free!

Can Develop 50 Campaigns with FE

Export Videos upto 720p

Transform any Video Clip to Meme Video right into Square and Vertical format. (so it supports Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest along with Stories of Fb, Insta and Snapchat)

Access to High converting Themes - 50+ Consisting of 25 Square themes and 25 Vertical Design templates

Brand-new UI and Easy to use Editor

Include Countdown timer to the Video

Include Computer animated GIF's to the Video - Upload or Resource it from Giphy

Include Timeline Bar on top or base of the video clip - This bar display the video clip size.

Source Videos from Youtube, FB, Vimeo, Instagram, Dailymotion, Amazon.com S3 or from your Computer system

Accessibility to Substantial Image Gallery to utilize on the Videos - Upload or Resource it from UnSplash

Accessibility to Massive Icons Gallery to use on the Videos - Can Publish very own Symbols also

Accessibility to Backgrounds, Shapes, Lines as well as Videos

Social share - YouTube and also Facebook

Can deal with videos upto 30 minutes.

Verdict

"It's A Large amount. Should I Invest Today?"

Not just are you obtaining access to VidViral 2.0 for the very best price ever supplied, yet additionally You're spending entirely without threat. VidViral 2.0 includes a 30-day Money Back Guarantee Plan. When you select VidViral 2.0, your fulfillment is guaranteed. If you are not completely pleased with it for any type of factor within the very first thirty days, you're qualified to a full reimbursement-- no doubt asked. You've got nothing to shed! What Are You Waiting for? Try It today and get The Complying with Bonus offer Now!

[miraculousgifsbug]

When you make a gif with giphy, you use the url video or you have already downloaded the video? I was trying to use giphy and it didn't accept me the url of a youtube video ):

Hi friend! Yes, I do typically use urls for giphy. And I also use chrome to answer your follow-up question. There are a few restrictions with giphy that may have stopped you from using the video:a) it was over 15 minutes longb) the user has it protected. There’s an option on youtube videos to not allow it’s posting or usage on other sites and, unfortunately, this affects giphyc) giphy is just being stupid. I can’t tell you the number of times it just stops loading a video or decides to not complete my gif. I usually wait about an hour and try again.Hope this helps!

[dorothydelgadillo]

Improve Animated GIF Performance With HTML5 video

Improve Animated GIF Performance With HTML5 video

Ayo Isaiah

2018-11-05T14:30:14+01:002018-11-05T14:45:15+00:00

Animated GIFs have a lot going for them; they’re easy to make and work well enough in literally all browsers. But the GIF format was not originally intended for animation. The original design of the GIF format was to provide a way to compress multiple images inside a single file using a lossless compression algorithm (called LZW compression) which meant they could be downloaded in a reasonably short space of time, even on slow connections.

Later, basic animation capabilities were added which allowed the various images (frames) in the file to be painted with time delays. By default, the series of frames that constitute the animation was displayed only once, stopping after the last frame was shown. Netscape Navigator 2.0 was the first browser to added the ability for animated GIFs to loop, which lead to the rise of animated GIFs as we know them today.

As an animation platform, the GIF format is incredibly limited. Each frame in the animation is restricted to a palette of just 256 colors, and over the years, advances in compression technology has made leading to several improvements the way animations and video files are compressed and used. Unlike proper video formats, the GIF format does not take advantage of any of the new technology meaning that even a few seconds of content can lead to tremendously large file sizes since a lot of repetitive information is stored.

Even if you try to tweak the quality and length of a GIF with a tool like Gifsicle, it can be difficult to cut it down to a reasonable file size. This is the reason why GIF heavy websites like Giphy, Imgur and the likes do not use the actual GIF format, but rather convert it to HTML5 video and serve those to users instead. As the Pinterest Engineering team found, converting animated GIFs to video can decrease load times and improve playback smoothness leading to a more pleasant user experience.

Hence, we’re going to look at some techniques that enable us use HTML5 video as a drop in replacement for animated GIFs. We’ll learn how to convert animated GIFs to video files and examine how to properly embed these video files on the web so that they act just like a GIF would. Finally, we’ll consider a few potential drawbacks that you need to ponder before using this solution.

Convert Animated GIFs To Video

The first step is to convert GIF files to a video format. MP4 is the most widely supported format in browsers with almost 94% of all browsers enjoying support, so that’s a safe default.

94% of all browsers support the MP4 format (Large preview)

Another option is the WebM format which offers high quality videos, often comparable to an MP4, but usually at a reduced file size. However, at this time, browser support is not as widespread so you can’t just go replacing MP4 files with their WebM equivalents.

Internet Explorer and Safari are notable browsers without WebM support (Large preview)

However, because the <video> tag supports multiple <source> files, we can serve WebM videos to browsers that support them while falling back to MP4 everywhere else.

Let’s go ahead and convert an animated GIF to both MP4 and WebM. There are several online tools that can help you do this, but many of them use ffmpeg under the hood so we’ll skip the middle man and just use that instead. ffmpeg is a free and open source command line tool that is designed for the processing of video and audio files. It can also be used to convert an animated GIF to video formats.

To find out if you have ffmpeg on your machine, fire up a terminal and run the ffmpeg command. This should display some diagnostic information, otherwise, you’ll need to install it. Installation instructions for Windows, macOS and Linux can be found on this page. Since we’ll be converting to is WebM, you need to make sure that whatever ffmpeg build you install is compiled with libvpx.

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Explore Smashing Membership ↬

To follow along with the commands that are included in this article, you can use any animated GIF file lying around on your computer or grab this one which is just over 28MB. Let’s begin by converting a GIF to MP4 in the next section.

Convert GIF To MP4

Open up a terminal instance and navigate to the directory where the test gif is located then run the command below to convert it to an MP4 video file:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif video.mp4

This should output a new video file in the current directory after a few seconds depending on the size of the GIF file you’re converting. The -i flag specifies the path to the input GIF file and the output file is specified afterwards (video.mp4 in this instance). Running this command on my 28MB GIF produces an MP4 file that is just 536KB in size, a 98% reduction in file size with roughly the same visual quality.

But we can go even further than that. ffmpeg has so many options that you can use to regulate the video output even further. One way is to employ an encoding method known as Constant Rate Factor (CRF) to trim the size of the MP4 output even further. Here’s the command you need to run:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif -b:v 0 -crf 25 video.mp4

As you can see, there are a couple of new flags in above command compared to the previous one. -b:v is normally used to limit the output bitrate, but when using CRF mode, it must be set to 0. The -crf flag controls the quality of the video output. It accepts a value between 0 and 51; the lower the value, the higher the video quality and file size.

Running the above command on the test GIF, trims down the video output to just 386KB with no discernable difference in quality. If you want to trim the size even further, you could increase the CRF value. Just keep in mind that higher values will lower the quality of the video file.

Convert GIF To WebM

You can convert your GIF file to WebM by running the command below in the terminal:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif -c vp9 -b:v 0 -crf 41 video.webm

This command is almost the same as the previous one, with the exception of a new -c flag which is used to specify the codec that should be used for this conversion. We are using the vp9 codec which succeeds the vp8 codec.

In addition, I’ve adjusted the CRF value to 41 in this case since CRF values don’t necessarily yield the same quality across video formats. This particular value results in a WebM file that is 16KB smaller than the MP4 with roughly the same visual quality.

Now that we know how to convert animated GIFs to video files, let’s look at how we can imitate their behavior in the browser with the HTML5 <video> tag.

Replace Animated GIFs With Video In The Browser

Making a video act like a GIF on a webpage is not as easy as dropping the file in an <img> tag, but it’s not so difficult either. The major qualities of animated GIFs to keep in mind are as follows:

They play automatically

They loop continuously

They are silent

While you get these qualities by default with GIF files, we can cause a video file to act the exact same way using a handful of attributes. Here’s how you’ll embed a video file to behave like a GIF:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline src="video.mp4"></video>

This markup instructs the browser to automatically start the video, loop it continuously, play no sound, and play inline without displaying any video controls. This gives the same experience as an animated GIF but with better performance.

To specify more that once source for a video, you can use the <source> element within the <video> tag like this:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm"> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"> </video>

This tells the browser to choose from the provided video files depending on format support. In this case, the WebM video will be downloaded and played if it’s supported, otherwise the MP4 file is used instead.

To make this more robust for older browsers which do not support HTML5 video, you could add some HTML content linking to the original GIF file as a fallback.

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm"> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"> Your browser does not support HTML5 video. <a href="/animated.gif">Click here to view original GIF</a> </video>

Or you could just add the GIF file directly in an <img> tag:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm"> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"> <img src="animated.gif"> </video>

Now that we’ve examined how to emulate animated GIFs in the browser with HTML5 video, let’s consider a few potential drawbacks to doing so in the next section.

Potential Drawbacks

There are a couple of drawbacks you need to consider before adopting HTML5 video as a GIF replacement. It’s clearly not as convenient as simply uploading a GIF to a page and watch is just work everywhere. You need to encode it first, and it may be difficult to implement an automated solution that works well in all scenarios.

The safest thing would be to convert each GIF manually and check the result of the output to ensure a good balance between visual quality and file size. But on large projects, this may not be practical. In that case, it may be better to look to a service like Cloudinary to do the heavy lifting for you.

Another problem is that unlike images, browsers do not preload video content. Because video files can be of any length, they’re often skipped until the main thread is ready to parse their content. This could delay the loading of a video file by several hundreds of milliseconds.

Additionally, there are quite a few restrictions on autoplaying videos especially on mobile. The muted attribute is actually required for videos to autoplay in Chrome for Android and iOS Safari even if the video does not contain an audio track, and where autoplay is disallowed, the user will only see a blank space where the video should have been. An example is Data Saver mode in Chrome for Android where autoplaying videos will not work even if you set up everything correctly.

To account for any of these scenarios, you should consider setting a placeholder image for the video using the poster attribute so that the video area is still populated with meaningful content if the video does not autoplay for some reason. Also consider using the controls attribute which allows the user to initiate playback even if video autoplay is disallowed.

Wrap Up

By replacing animated GIFs with HTML5 video, we can provide awesome GIF-like experiences without the performance and quality drawbacks associated with GIF files. Doing away with animated GIFs is worth serious consideration especially if your site is GIF-heavy.

There are websites already doing this:

Twitter converts animated GIFs to MP4 files on upload

GIF performance was improved on Pinterest by converting them to videos

Imgur, a GIF heavy website, converts all GIF uploads to HTML5 video

Taking the time to convert the GIF files on your site to video can lead to a massive improvement in page load times. Provided your website is not too complex, it is fairly easy to implement and you can be up and running within a very short amount of time.

(ra,dm)

[nancydsmithus]

Improve Animated GIF Performance With HTML5 video

Improve Animated GIF Performance With HTML5 video

Ayo Isaiah

2018-11-05T14:30:14+01:002018-11-05T14:45:15+00:00

Animated GIFs have a lot going for them; they’re easy to make and work well enough in literally all browsers. But the GIF format was not originally intended for animation. The original design of the GIF format was to provide a way to compress multiple images inside a single file using a lossless compression algorithm (called LZW compression) which meant they could be downloaded in a reasonably short space of time, even on slow connections.

Later, basic animation capabilities were added which allowed the various images (frames) in the file to be painted with time delays. By default, the series of frames that constitute the animation was displayed only once, stopping after the last frame was shown. Netscape Navigator 2.0 was the first browser to added the ability for animated GIFs to loop, which lead to the rise of animated GIFs as we know them today.

As an animation platform, the GIF format is incredibly limited. Each frame in the animation is restricted to a palette of just 256 colors, and over the years, advances in compression technology has made leading to several improvements the way animations and video files are compressed and used. Unlike proper video formats, the GIF format does not take advantage of any of the new technology meaning that even a few seconds of content can lead to tremendously large file sizes since a lot of repetitive information is stored.

Even if you try to tweak the quality and length of a GIF with a tool like Gifsicle, it can be difficult to cut it down to a reasonable file size. This is the reason why GIF heavy websites like Giphy, Imgur and the likes do not use the actual GIF format, but rather convert it to HTML5 video and serve those to users instead. As the Pinterest Engineering team found, converting animated GIFs to video can decrease load times and improve playback smoothness leading to a more pleasant user experience.

Hence, we’re going to look at some techniques that enable us use HTML5 video as a drop in replacement for animated GIFs. We’ll learn how to convert animated GIFs to video files and examine how to properly embed these video files on the web so that they act just like a GIF would. Finally, we’ll consider a few potential drawbacks that you need to ponder before using this solution.

Convert Animated GIFs To Video

The first step is to convert GIF files to a video format. MP4 is the most widely supported format in browsers with almost 94% of all browsers enjoying support, so that’s a safe default.

94% of all browsers support the MP4 format (Large preview)

Another option is the WebM format which offers high quality videos, often comparable to an MP4, but usually at a reduced file size. However, at this time, browser support is not as widespread so you can’t just go replacing MP4 files with their WebM equivalents.

Internet Explorer and Safari are notable browsers without WebM support (Large preview)

However, because the <video> tag supports multiple <source> files, we can serve WebM videos to browsers that support them while falling back to MP4 everywhere else.

Let’s go ahead and convert an animated GIF to both MP4 and WebM. There are several online tools that can help you do this, but many of them use ffmpeg under the hood so we’ll skip the middle man and just use that instead. ffmpeg is a free and open source command line tool that is designed for the processing of video and audio files. It can also be used to convert an animated GIF to video formats.

To find out if you have ffmpeg on your machine, fire up a terminal and run the ffmpeg command. This should display some diagnostic information, otherwise, you’ll need to install it. Installation instructions for Windows, macOS and Linux can be found on this page. Since we’ll be converting to is WebM, you need to make sure that whatever ffmpeg build you install is compiled with libvpx.

Getting workflow just right ain’t an easy task. So are proper estimates. Or alignment among different departments. That’s why we’ve set up “this-is-how-I-work”-sessions — with smart cookies sharing what works well for them. A part of the Smashing Membership, of course.

Explore Smashing Membership ↬

To follow along with the commands that are included in this article, you can use any animated GIF file lying around on your computer or grab this one which is just over 28MB. Let’s begin by converting a GIF to MP4 in the next section.

Convert GIF To MP4

Open up a terminal instance and navigate to the directory where the test gif is located then run the command below to convert it to an MP4 video file:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif video.mp4

This should output a new video file in the current directory after a few seconds depending on the size of the GIF file you’re converting. The -i flag specifies the path to the input GIF file and the output file is specified afterwards (video.mp4 in this instance). Running this command on my 28MB GIF produces an MP4 file that is just 536KB in size, a 98% reduction in file size with roughly the same visual quality.

But we can go even further than that. ffmpeg has so many options that you can use to regulate the video output even further. One way is to employ an encoding method known as Constant Rate Factor (CRF) to trim the size of the MP4 output even further. Here’s the command you need to run:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif -b:v 0 -crf 25 video.mp4

As you can see, there are a couple of new flags in above command compared to the previous one. -b:v is normally used to limit the output bitrate, but when using CRF mode, it must be set to 0. The -crf flag controls the quality of the video output. It accepts a value between 0 and 51; the lower the value, the higher the video quality and file size.

Running the above command on the test GIF, trims down the video output to just 386KB with no discernable difference in quality. If you want to trim the size even further, you could increase the CRF value. Just keep in mind that higher values will lower the quality of the video file.

Convert GIF To WebM

You can convert your GIF file to WebM by running the command below in the terminal:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif -c vp9 -b:v 0 -crf 41 video.webm

This command is almost the same as the previous one, with the exception of a new -c flag which is used to specify the codec that should be used for this conversion. We are using the vp9 codec which succeeds the vp8 codec.

In addition, I’ve adjusted the CRF value to 41 in this case since CRF values don’t necessarily yield the same quality across video formats. This particular value results in a WebM file that is 16KB smaller than the MP4 with roughly the same visual quality.

Now that we know how to convert animated GIFs to video files, let’s look at how we can imitate their behavior in the browser with the HTML5 <video> tag.

Replace Animated GIFs With Video In The Browser

Making a video act like a GIF on a webpage is not as easy as dropping the file in an <img> tag, but it’s not so difficult either. The major qualities of animated GIFs to keep in mind are as follows:

They play automatically

They loop continuously

They are silent

While you get these qualities by default with GIF files, we can cause a video file to act the exact same way using a handful of attributes. Here’s how you’ll embed a video file to behave like a GIF:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline src="video.mp4"></video>

This markup instructs the browser to automatically start the video, loop it continuously, play no sound, and play inline without displaying any video controls. This gives the same experience as an animated GIF but with better performance.

To specify more that once source for a video, you can use the <source> element within the <video> tag like this:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm"> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"> </video>

This tells the browser to choose from the provided video files depending on format support. In this case, the WebM video will be downloaded and played if it’s supported, otherwise the MP4 file is used instead.

To make this more robust for older browsers which do not support HTML5 video, you could add some HTML content linking to the original GIF file as a fallback.

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm"> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"> Your browser does not support HTML5 video. <a href="/animated.gif">Click here to view original GIF</a> </video>

Or you could just add the GIF file directly in an <img> tag:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm"> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"> <img src="animated.gif"> </video>

Now that we’ve examined how to emulate animated GIFs in the browser with HTML5 video, let’s consider a few potential drawbacks to doing so in the next section.

Potential Drawbacks

There are a couple of drawbacks you need to consider before adopting HTML5 video as a GIF replacement. It’s clearly not as convenient as simply uploading a GIF to a page and watch is just work everywhere. You need to encode it first, and it may be difficult to implement an automated solution that works well in all scenarios.

The safest thing would be to convert each GIF manually and check the result of the output to ensure a good balance between visual quality and file size. But on large projects, this may not be practical. In that case, it may be better to look to a service like Cloudinary to do the heavy lifting for you.

Another problem is that unlike images, browsers do not preload video content. Because video files can be of any length, they’re often skipped until the main thread is ready to parse their content. This could delay the loading of a video file by several hundreds of milliseconds.

Additionally, there are quite a few restrictions on autoplaying videos especially on mobile. The muted attribute is actually required for videos to autoplay in Chrome for Android and iOS Safari even if the video does not contain an audio track, and where autoplay is disallowed, the user will only see a blank space where the video should have been. An example is Data Saver mode in Chrome for Android where autoplaying videos will not work even if you set up everything correctly.

To account for any of these scenarios, you should consider setting a placeholder image for the video using the poster attribute so that the video area is still populated with meaningful content if the video does not autoplay for some reason. Also consider using the controls attribute which allows the user to initiate playback even if video autoplay is disallowed.

Wrap Up

By replacing animated GIFs with HTML5 video, we can provide awesome GIF-like experiences without the performance and quality drawbacks associated with GIF files. Doing away with animated GIFs is worth serious consideration especially if your site is GIF-heavy.

There are websites already doing this:

Twitter converts animated GIFs to MP4 files on upload

GIF performance was improved on Pinterest by converting them to videos

Imgur, a GIF heavy website, converts all GIF uploads to HTML5 video

Taking the time to convert the GIF files on your site to video can lead to a massive improvement in page load times. Provided your website is not too complex, it is fairly easy to implement and you can be up and running within a very short amount of time.

(ra,dm)

[itspnicole]

Improve Animated GIF Performance With HTML5 video

Improve Animated GIF Performance With HTML5 video

Ayo Isaiah

2018-11-05T14:30:14+01:002018-11-05T14:45:15+00:00

Animated GIFs have a lot going for them; they’re easy to make and work well enough in literally all browsers. But the GIF format was not originally intended for animation. The original design of the GIF format was to provide a way to compress multiple images inside a single file using a lossless compression algorithm (called LZW compression) which meant they could be downloaded in a reasonably short space of time, even on slow connections.

Later, basic animation capabilities were added which allowed the various images (frames) in the file to be painted with time delays. By default, the series of frames that constitute the animation was displayed only once, stopping after the last frame was shown. Netscape Navigator 2.0 was the first browser to added the ability for animated GIFs to loop, which lead to the rise of animated GIFs as we know them today.

As an animation platform, the GIF format is incredibly limited. Each frame in the animation is restricted to a palette of just 256 colors, and over the years, advances in compression technology has made leading to several improvements the way animations and video files are compressed and used. Unlike proper video formats, the GIF format does not take advantage of any of the new technology meaning that even a few seconds of content can lead to tremendously large file sizes since a lot of repetitive information is stored.

Even if you try to tweak the quality and length of a GIF with a tool like Gifsicle, it can be difficult to cut it down to a reasonable file size. This is the reason why GIF heavy websites like Giphy, Imgur and the likes do not use the actual GIF format, but rather convert it to HTML5 video and serve those to users instead. As the Pinterest Engineering team found, converting animated GIFs to video can decrease load times and improve playback smoothness leading to a more pleasant user experience.

Hence, we’re going to look at some techniques that enable us use HTML5 video as a drop in replacement for animated GIFs. We’ll learn how to convert animated GIFs to video files and examine how to properly embed these video files on the web so that they act just like a GIF would. Finally, we’ll consider a few potential drawbacks that you need to ponder before using this solution.

Convert Animated GIFs To Video

The first step is to convert GIF files to a video format. MP4 is the most widely supported format in browsers with almost 94% of all browsers enjoying support, so that’s a safe default.

94% of all browsers support the MP4 format (Large preview)

Another option is the WebM format which offers high quality videos, often comparable to an MP4, but usually at a reduced file size. However, at this time, browser support is not as widespread so you can’t just go replacing MP4 files with their WebM equivalents.

Internet Explorer and Safari are notable browsers without WebM support (Large preview)

However, because the <video> tag supports multiple <source> files, we can serve WebM videos to browsers that support them while falling back to MP4 everywhere else.

Let’s go ahead and convert an animated GIF to both MP4 and WebM. There are several online tools that can help you do this, but many of them use ffmpeg under the hood so we’ll skip the middle man and just use that instead. ffmpeg is a free and open source command line tool that is designed for the processing of video and audio files. It can also be used to convert an animated GIF to video formats.

To find out if you have ffmpeg on your machine, fire up a terminal and run the ffmpeg command. This should display some diagnostic information, otherwise, you’ll need to install it. Installation instructions for Windows, macOS and Linux can be found on this page. Since we’ll be converting to is WebM, you need to make sure that whatever ffmpeg build you install is compiled with libvpx.

Getting workflow just right ain’t an easy task. So are proper estimates. Or alignment among different departments. That’s why we’ve set up “this-is-how-I-work”-sessions — with smart cookies sharing what works well for them. A part of the Smashing Membership, of course.

Explore Smashing Membership ↬

To follow along with the commands that are included in this article, you can use any animated GIF file lying around on your computer or grab this one which is just over 28MB. Let’s begin by converting a GIF to MP4 in the next section.

Convert GIF To MP4

Open up a terminal instance and navigate to the directory where the test gif is located then run the command below to convert it to an MP4 video file:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif video.mp4

This should output a new video file in the current directory after a few seconds depending on the size of the GIF file you’re converting. The -i flag specifies the path to the input GIF file and the output file is specified afterwards (video.mp4 in this instance). Running this command on my 28MB GIF produces an MP4 file that is just 536KB in size, a 98% reduction in file size with roughly the same visual quality.

But we can go even further than that. ffmpeg has so many options that you can use to regulate the video output even further. One way is to employ an encoding method known as Constant Rate Factor (CRF) to trim the size of the MP4 output even further. Here’s the command you need to run:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif -b:v 0 -crf 25 video.mp4

As you can see, there are a couple of new flags in above command compared to the previous one. -b:v is normally used to limit the output bitrate, but when using CRF mode, it must be set to 0. The -crf flag controls the quality of the video output. It accepts a value between 0 and 51; the lower the value, the higher the video quality and file size.

Running the above command on the test GIF, trims down the video output to just 386KB with no discernable difference in quality. If you want to trim the size even further, you could increase the CRF value. Just keep in mind that higher values will lower the quality of the video file.

Convert GIF To WebM

You can convert your GIF file to WebM by running the command below in the terminal:

ffmpeg -i animated.gif -c vp9 -b:v 0 -crf 41 video.webm

This command is almost the same as the previous one, with the exception of a new -c flag which is used to specify the codec that should be used for this conversion. We are using the vp9 codec which succeeds the vp8 codec.

In addition, I’ve adjusted the CRF value to 41 in this case since CRF values don’t necessarily yield the same quality across video formats. This particular value results in a WebM file that is 16KB smaller than the MP4 with roughly the same visual quality.

Now that we know how to convert animated GIFs to video files, let’s look at how we can imitate their behavior in the browser with the HTML5 <video> tag.

Replace Animated GIFs With Video In The Browser

Making a video act like a GIF on a webpage is not as easy as dropping the file in an <img> tag, but it’s not so difficult either. The major qualities of animated GIFs to keep in mind are as follows:

They play automatically

They loop continuously

They are silent

While you get these qualities by default with GIF files, we can cause a video file to act the exact same way using a handful of attributes. Here’s how you’ll embed a video file to behave like a GIF:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline src="video.mp4"></video>

This markup instructs the browser to automatically start the video, loop it continuously, play no sound, and play inline without displaying any video controls. This gives the same experience as an animated GIF but with better performance.

To specify more that once source for a video, you can use the <source> element within the <video> tag like this:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm"> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"> </video>

This tells the browser to choose from the provided video files depending on format support. In this case, the WebM video will be downloaded and played if it’s supported, otherwise the MP4 file is used instead.

To make this more robust for older browsers which do not support HTML5 video, you could add some HTML content linking to the original GIF file as a fallback.

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm"> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"> Your browser does not support HTML5 video. <a href="/animated.gif">Click here to view original GIF</a> </video>

Or you could just add the GIF file directly in an <img> tag:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm"> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"> <img src="animated.gif"> </video>

Now that we’ve examined how to emulate animated GIFs in the browser with HTML5 video, let’s consider a few potential drawbacks to doing so in the next section.

Potential Drawbacks

There are a couple of drawbacks you need to consider before adopting HTML5 video as a GIF replacement. It’s clearly not as convenient as simply uploading a GIF to a page and watch is just work everywhere. You need to encode it first, and it may be difficult to implement an automated solution that works well in all scenarios.

The safest thing would be to convert each GIF manually and check the result of the output to ensure a good balance between visual quality and file size. But on large projects, this may not be practical. In that case, it may be better to look to a service like Cloudinary to do the heavy lifting for you.

Another problem is that unlike images, browsers do not preload video content. Because video files can be of any length, they’re often skipped until the main thread is ready to parse their content. This could delay the loading of a video file by several hundreds of milliseconds.

Additionally, there are quite a few restrictions on autoplaying videos especially on mobile. The muted attribute is actually required for videos to autoplay in Chrome for Android and iOS Safari even if the video does not contain an audio track, and where autoplay is disallowed, the user will only see a blank space where the video should have been. An example is Data Saver mode in Chrome for Android where autoplaying videos will not work even if you set up everything correctly.

To account for any of these scenarios, you should consider setting a placeholder image for the video using the poster attribute so that the video area is still populated with meaningful content if the video does not autoplay for some reason. Also consider using the controls attribute which allows the user to initiate playback even if video autoplay is disallowed.

Wrap Up

By replacing animated GIFs with HTML5 video, we can provide awesome GIF-like experiences without the performance and quality drawbacks associated with GIF files. Doing away with animated GIFs is worth serious consideration especially if your site is GIF-heavy.

There are websites already doing this:

Twitter converts animated GIFs to MP4 files on upload

GIF performance was improved on Pinterest by converting them to videos

Imgur, a GIF heavy website, converts all GIF uploads to HTML5 video

Taking the time to convert the GIF files on your site to video can lead to a massive improvement in page load times. Provided your website is not too complex, it is fairly easy to implement and you can be up and running within a very short amount of time.

(ra,dm)

[patsycook30]

Will Moving Companies Pack For You?

Will Moving Companies Pack For You?

The question will moving companies pack for you is an often asked questions in the relocation industry.  There are many circumstances that require a moving company to pack for its customers. 

In many cases, a person might just want their belongings dealt with and packed for them.  Most people hate the process of packing up their belongings.  Here’s a great article on how to pack boxes for a move.  Additionally, here’s a great article on how to roll clothing.

via GIPHY

Some of the reasons a person might need their belongings packed for them include:

To save time

In order to alleviate some of the stress of moving

Due to a physical disability

Because they are unable to pack themselves

The appropriate person won’t be present to pack items

How Moving Companies Handle Packing

Each moving company has a different process for handling packing a person’s belongings.  However, each moving company will have a team of experienced packers if they do offer packing services.

A company’s packers are well trained in packing your belongings.  Their main goal is to do so in an efficient way.   When your belongings are packed, you will want boxes and supplies to be maximized while keeping your items safe.

Your items need to be backed in a particular way.  Packers should be aware to not damage any items but to pack as efficiently as possible for the move.

Generally speaking, packing is handled in the following way:

Moving company will speak to you to arrange the packing of your belongings

Relocation service provider will enter your home and speak to you about items that need packing

Movers and packers will go room to room with you to discuss any special requirements you may have

Packers will work efficiently and quickly to pack your belongings in boxes and crates

Furniture items may be disassembled and wrapped in protective plastic

Items will then be moved onto the moving van

Moving Companies Charge Extra For Packing

In most cases, moving companies will charge extra for packing.  You will want to clarify with the company you are hiring how they charge and perform packing services.  Here are some important questions you should ask:

Do you provide packing services and full-service moves?

What are your charges for packing items?

Do you charge additional fees for assembly and disassembly of furniture?

What can I expect if I purchase packaging services alongside the move?

How do you handle broken items or damaged goods due to improper packing?

Many Moving Companies Offer Full Service Options

A full-service move is essentially a move that includes packing, assembling furniture, disassembling furniture, hauling and anything else associated with your relocation.  In the event of a large residential move or a corporate relocation, hiring full-service movers can be very handy.

A full-service moving company will expertly handle all of the packing and unpacking of your household or business items.  This can be particularly important when you are moving fragile items such as glass, artwork, valuables, antiques, office items and more.

Hiring a full service moving company ensures that you are hiring someone who is skilled at expertly packing valuables.   Additionally, they should be fully insured in the unfortunate situation of damage to your belongings.

Full Service Movers Provide The Following Services

Providing Packing Supplies

Your full service moving company should provide packing materials and supplies to help get you moved.  You should always ask in advance, and if you ask them to pack on a whim they may not have the moving and packing supplies handy.

Specify when you contact your moving company for your free moving quote that you need a full-service move.  You can ask them the questions specified above at this point.  You should also make sure they do provide packing supplies.

Packing And Boxing All Items

Packing is the part of moving most people dread the most.  And with good reason!  If you don’t pack your items correctly, you risk having them destroyed during the move.  However, you can prevent this from happening by hiring the best moving company to deal with your move.  Read this post on how to choose a moving company here.

When packers pack up your items for a move, they will do so with absolute care and efficiency.  You can expect that they will use proper packing supplies to ensure safe transport of all belongings.  In addition and due to their skill level, they will get your home or office packed up quicker than you would yourself!

Disassembly Of All Furniture

Full-service movers will certainly disassemble furniture for your move.  You will have items, such as tables, consoles, desks, bureaus, your bed and much more that will all need to be taken apart safely in order to transport it.

You may want to also ask if your moving company will be re-assembling your furniture as well.  Most should as you can not be expected to put together your bed frame on your own!  But specify everything with your moving company because each company has a different way of doing things.  Each company will also have a different way of charging you so it’s crucial to be aware in advance of your move.

Hauling Furniture Items And Boxes

Hauling your furniture items is also an important part of your full-service move.  Moving items from your home to the truck takes a lot of work.  However, this service is included with your full service move so rest assured.

If you have items that need to be discarded, you can contact a company for junk and furniture removal in addition to the moving services.  Many times, people don’t want to take everything to their new home.  This all should be sorted out beforehand.

Loading The Truck

Loading the truck is an important part of your full-service move and should be done correctly.  If your packers have packed up your boxes correctly (which they should have!) loading the truck will be no problem at all!

Traditionally, bulkier and heavier items will be placed on the bottom and light items or boxes with little trinkets, breakables and small items will be placed on top.

Moving Your Belongings

Full-service movers will transport belongings as any movers would.  Once everything has been packed properly, your belongings will then be transported in the moving van to the new destination. 

You will want to specify if there will be any additional stops on the way.  Get a clear estimate on how long the moving process will take so that you can choose the right moving company for the job!

Unpacking

In addition to packing up and loading your items, your full service moving company will be there to do the unpacking too!  You will want to specify how they charge for all of this.  As you know, having them work a little harder will certainly cost a little more.  However, most people find it to be worth it as the stress of moving can by a lot.

When the moving van arrives at it’s destination, the moving company will unload the boxes and furniture into your new place.  From here, they will assemble all furniture and unpack for you if you want them too.  It’s best to have boxes labeled appropriately to make the process more efficient.  However, most moving companies will know how to plan everything properly and make your move as easy and seamless as possible!

Throwing Stuff Out

Your full-service movers will additionally throw away and clean up any mess that they make.  This is essential as you don’t want a house full of empty boxes and packing supplies once they have moved you!

via GIPHY

Determining Costs Of A Full-Service Move

While every company will charge a little different, there are ways you can easily determine the costs of your full service move.  Busy Beez Movers of Greenville, SC doesn’t charge extra for assembling and disassembling furniture.  So you may want to contact them and ask for an estimate!

Some of the things that might affect the cost of your full-service move:

The size of the move

How many movers are needed for your relocation

Distance of the relocation

Number of items to be packed

Amount of packing supplies needed

Number of hours working

Time of year for the relocation

How Long Does Packing And Moving Take?

This is a great question that many customers ask.  However, the amount of time it takes to pack for a move and relocate varies.  Some smaller moves such as apartment moves may take only a couple of hours.  However, larger moves can be planned and executed over the course of a few weeks.

Taking into consideration the distance of the move, the number of items to be moved, and the capacity of the movers is important in determining how long it takes to pack and move a person or business.

Hire The Best Movers For The Job

Perhaps the most important thing is to hire the best moving company for the job.  In doing so you will ensure the safe transport of all of your belongings and will be moved with less stress than if you hire inferior movers.

Hiring great movers doesn’t take a lot.  It just requires that you research a little and read online reviews.  You can also get references from family and friends to be sure that your move is in the right hands.

Here are some steps you can take to hire the best moving company for your full service move:

If you need packing, ask if they will pack for you and how do they charge

Get references from family and friends

Ask the company for references

Read reviews

Speak to them on the phone to get an idea of how they deal with people

We hope we have answered your questions related to full service moves and we hope you now know if moving companies will pack for you!

The post Will Moving Companies Pack For You? appeared first on Busy Beez Movers.

source https://busybeezmovers.com/will-moving-companies-pack-for-you/ from Busy Beez Movers https://busybeezmovers1.blogspot.com/2020/04/will-moving-companies-pack-for-you.html