It once seemed there were no new ideas out there. Or at least very few new ideas, and most of them came out of NASA research, so we were told. (It turns out that NASA stole all of its ideas from “Star Trek.”) But that perception came about due to the extreme lack of instant communication from which the Internet finally liberated us. Now we can access countless new ideas by merely bringing up Google.

Yesterday my editor suggested I could upload micro-clips of video to serve as blog illustrations. Micro, he says, so not to use up precious bandwidth. He offered up a vast CD library of personal videos – mostly of his cats (the guy never had kids) – from which to cull said micro-clips. Oh joy.

I’d rather not have to edit these little vignettes, encode them into Flash, and then embed the clip and a Flash player into various and sundry blogs, thank you. Oh, and also upload them in RA format for the Flash-challenged. And in downloadable WMV format for whiny Windows users. Thanks, boss, nothing to it!

But here’s an idea: can I convert them into animated GIFs? I’m sure I’ve seen such GIFs elsewhere. It’s a universal format, as easy to upload as any picture. But how, how…

Let’s Google it. “OSX video to animated gif” – whoah! – 165,000 results in .21 seconds! What’s this first one? A chat board, the gold mine shaft of the Internet. Why bother reading? Hit the first link and we have GIFBuilder for OSX 1.0. The free download takes less than a frog’s heartbeat for the 292K program. Double-click and we’re up and running.

Okay, a little work is required here. Open iMovie, start a new project, grab about 1 second of ridiculous cat video, export using Quicktime – smallest size, open GIFBuilder, start a new project, open the cat micro-video, Options-Loop, and save. From start to finish in less than 5 minutes. Here, I’ll make a longer one… yep, under 4 minutes… the learning curve shortens. One more, and that’s my blog for this week…

Polly Wiggles Her Butt

Mugsie Hiding

Mugsie Licks Polly

Hodgepodge Grumblebeak

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