How to add animated GIF to video

Apr 15, 2020

You can now use animated GIF images in videos. Play the video below to see this in action:

At the moment, GIF animations only work with videos made from scripts (GIFs will not be animated in videos made from PowerPoint presentations). To add an animated GIF to your video, just add the image to the project files and list it in the script as any other image, for example:

{.example}

(image: somefile.gif)

Animated gifs will play in a loop, for the duration of the audio in the scene. If you want to play the animation just once, instead of looping, add the sync property and set it to freeze:

{.example}

(image: 
  file: somefile.gif
  sync: freeze)

Using the markdown image syntax, you can make this a bit shorter:

{.example}

![freeze](somefile.gif)

You can also use all the usual sizing properties, such as cover, contain or fit to automatically resize the image to match the video size. Check out the image format reference for more information.

Animated GIF to Instagram video

One potentially fun application of this new feature is to easily produce Instagram videos from animated GIFs. To do that, just set the size property in the script header to instagram. Here is an example:

{.example}

---
size: instagram
---

(image: somefile.gif)

Narakeet will read this text while the image is playing.

You can alternatively use instagram-story or instagram-square to produce the appropriate video for Instagram stories or in the square format. Check out the size format reference for more information.

Full example

To help you test this new feature easily, we published an example project to GitHub. Grab the files from the script directory, and upload to Narakeet as a new script project.