Just wanna add another reccomendation here for a software called "Free Video to GIF Converter".
http://www.video-gif-converter.com/It's very lightweight, easy to use and has some nice features.
- You can select a whole video and type in what point in the video you would like it to capture. For example 00:02:00 to 00:02:30 (this will capture 30 seconds worth of video from 2 minutes in). It takes a moment to find the point in the video then it'll start capturing.
Or just make a short clip using Windows Movie Maker, Machete or some other software that can cut up video and load that in. The default capture is up to 30 seconds of video without putting in a custom range.
- You can choose the height/width of what the GIF will be. Plus how many frames per second to capture from the video (lots of frames means bigger filesize, but only a few frames can make it less smooth).
- After its done capturing it lets you remove frames. This is really useful to customise how the scene plays out or to tweak the filesize further by getting rid of unecessary frames. Only drawback is there doesn't seem to be an Undo button, so if you remove some frames you wanted to keep the only option is to Reload all the frames. It'd also be nice if there was a keyboard shortcut rather than the Remove frame button. But still it is a nice feature to have in a free software.
- You can also select the quality level to tweak the color matching (though will result in a bigger filesize). Or choose to adjust the play speed (to make it play out in slow motion by setting the FPS lower or faster by setting it higher), by default it'll match the same speed as the video.
There's more info on the Guide on the website.
Happy GIFing! Here's a thread to add your creations to:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2165