1. Trim to the exact frame
The timeline reads your clip's real frame rate and shows time as seconds plus frames, so the readout says 1s 9f, not a vague decimal. Drag the in and out handles to rough it in, then tap the arrow keys to nudge a single frame at a time. A loop that opens and closes on the right frame reads as intentional; half a beat off reads as a glitch. The full method lives in the frame-perfect trimming guide.
2. Put text on it (memes included)
Up to three captions per GIF. The Meme style is the classic look: white Impact-style letters with a black outline, auto-uppercased, auto-wrapped. The Clean style uses a brand font with a color picker for labels and lower-thirds. Park a caption at the top or bottom, or choose Drag and place it anywhere on the preview. Each caption can also be timed, visible from one second mark to another, so the punchline lands exactly when you want it. There's a whole video meme generator page on the art of it.
3. Sequence up to three clips
Add a second or third clip and the sequence timeline appears: every clip as a block sized to its trimmed length, every caption as a bar on its own lane, and a playhead you can scrub straight through the cuts. Text bars snap to clip boundaries and to each other, so butting two captions together is the default outcome, not luck. A yellow tick means butted clean; a red band means two captions share the screen (fine when it's top text plus bottom text, worth a look when it isn't). The combine videos guide covers the editorial side.
4. Choose the frame clip
One clip sets the GIF's size and shape, clip 1 by default. Click the ⛶ toggle on any other clip's chip to hand it the frame instead; the FRAME badge moves, the output dimensions follow, and every other clip adapts. Lead with a wide clip for a 16:9 GIF, or give the frame to a vertical phone clip and let the rest fall in line.
5. Decide how mismatched clips fit
When clips have different shapes, the Mismatched Clips setting decides what happens. Crop to fill (the default) scales each clip to fill the frame and trims the overflow, and the preview dims exactly what will be trimmed so there are no surprises. Fit with bars keeps every pixel and pads the difference with black bars, pillarboxed or letterboxed depending on which way the shapes disagree, shown live in the viewer.
6. Reverse a clip
The ⇄ toggle in the trim row plays the active clip backwards in the export. It's per clip, so in a sequence you can run one clip in reverse while the others play forward (the spilled coffee un-spills, then the next clip carries on normally). To see it in motion before exporting, hit ▶ Play edit on the sequence panel: it rehearses the whole edit through the encoder's own pipeline, cuts, captions, bars, and yes, reversed clips actually run backwards.
The dials underneath everything
Whatever you build, four controls decide the file: frame rate (10 to 15 fps suits most GIFs), scale (downsizing width is the biggest single saving), colors (64 to 128 is plenty for most footage), and dithering (smooths gradients at a small size cost). The live size estimate updates as you move any of them, so you tune to a number instead of exporting and hoping. Chasing a hard ceiling? The small-file recipe squeezes hardest; chasing crispness, read high-quality video to GIF.
And the part that never changes: all of it runs in your browser tab. No upload, no account, no watermark. Close the wifi after the page loads and every feature on this page still works.