How to Make Instagram Story GIFs

Instagram Story GIFs have gotten extremely popular over the past few years because they add a layer of personality that is very engaging and shareable to others. In this blog, we will show you how you can turn your normal videos into seamless, looping Instagram Story GIFs from start to finish.

Today, we will be using Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Photoshop, so make sure you have these applications ready before you get started. We will also briefly go over how to remove the greenscreens to make your Instagram Story GIFs have transparent backgrounds.

Prepare Video on Premiere Pro

• The first step is to create a project. 
• Drag and drop your video into the Project Bin, and then onto the timeline. 
• Now, use the Razor tool to find the start and end of the clip that you want to use. This will be the first half of your GIF. 

• After you have chosen your clip, you can remove all other elements from your timeline (including audio files). You should now only have the one clip that you have chosen.
• Now we will go over how to key out the greenscreen. If you don’t have a green screen, skip 3 steps. 
• Search for “Ultra Key” in your effects panel. Drag and drop this effect onto your clip.

• In the column “Key Color”, click on the eyedropper icon and then sample the green screen from your program monitor. 
• If your green screen was set up properly, this should be good enough. However, in some cases, when there are different shades of green or even shadows in the background, you would need to sample the average of these shades and play around with “Matte Generation”, “Matte Cleanup”, “Spill Suppression”, and “Color Correction” in order to have a clean removal. We will not be covering these techniques in this tutorial but feel free to contact us for any questions!
• At this point, you should have your video without a background. Now you need to duplicate this clip. After duplication, you need to put the new clip right after your first clip with no gaps in between. 
• Now, right-click your second clip and click on reverse speed.

• You should be done! Playback the video and make any adjustments as necessary (like trimming the clip or changing the speed). The most important thing about seamless videos is that your second clip has to exactly match the original (except that it is reversed). 
• Now, you are ready to export this video. Export this video in the “Quicktime” format and choose “GoPro CineForm RGB with alpha at Maximum Bit Depth”. Now, find “Quality” under “Video” and slide that to 5. Lastly, check “Render at Maximum Depth” and click on “RGBA 12-bpc + alpha”. Now you are ready to turn this video into an Instagram Story GIF.
  

Prepare File on Photoshop

• Open Photoshop.
• Click File>Import>Video Frames to Layers

• Now, wait for the loading to end and then choose your video. On the next screen, you can choose to skip frames. We usually put 2 or 3 in that box and then speed up the framerate afterwards. 
• You should now see the frames in the timeline. If you don’t see your timeline, click on the “Window” tab and select “Timeline”. 
• Now you can control the speed of each frame. Usually, if we skipped frames, we would choose a faster speed. However, it’s all about playing around with Photoshop and choosing a speed and framerate that follows your creative vision. To change all the frames at once, simply click on the first frame and then click on the last frame while pressing shift. Then, you can choose their preset speeds or create a custom one

• Once you have chosen a speed that works the best, you are now ready to export. Go to Export>Save for Web
• We usually don’t touch the settings here. However, if you have to keep the filesize under a certain size, you could reduce the number of colours as well as reducing the percentage (reducing the resolution). Remember, Instagram only allows for a file size under 10 MB for these types of files.
• And then export!

Now you are ready to turn your GIF into an Instagram Story GIF! To do this, send the file from the computer to your phone and save it to your camera roll. Next, open Instagram and record your story. Once you are done recording, go back to the gallery and copy the GIF onto your clipboard. To do this, for IOS users, simply press the icon on the lower left (looks like a box with an arrow pointing up) and press “Copy Photo”. For Android users, you may need to search up how to copy the GIF on your particular device. Lastly, go back to your Instagram app and there should be a popup now that says “Add Sticker”. And voila! That is how you turn your videos into engaging Instagram Story GIFs. Alternatively, you can make your gifs available via gif search on Instagram, Snapchat & most socials by applying to have a public GIPHY channel, a process which is outlined at the end of this article.

Of course, not everything is always perfect in the real world. For example, removing the background of a video with multiple shades of green and shadows will require tens of hours of learning and fixing. Knowing how to compress and optimize your files is also something that only comes with experience. If you are a brand looking to make Instagram Story GIFs, we would recommend you contact us. We specialize in making custom GIFs or Instagram augmented reality face filters. Reach out to us at info@newfuturecreative.com! Check out our other articles here, and see our past client work.