Hey HN, I'm one of the back-end engineers at Gifs.com and we just launched a brand new editor that anyone can use to create and augment videos online.

We started with the premise of democratizing video editing by making an iMovie-lite in the cloud. Our goal is to empower people around the world to express themselves. We still have a lot of ideas in the works to make finding, creating and augmenting short-form media frictionless but launching our new editor is the back-bone of that dream.

You may remember us from gifyoutube.com where anyone could add gif in front of youtube and we would let you trim the video and add captions. Now you can simply replace youtube.com with gifs.com or put gifs.com/edit/ in front of any video or GIF to open it up in the new editor with even more editing capabilities.

Everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words, so does that mean a GIF must be worth n pictures where n is frames in the GIF? After checking out /r/reactiongifs/ and /r/wastedgifs I now believe so.

The player looks super nice and was very easy to use. Hope y'all do well.

Thanks for the kind words Ian!

what do you mean by democratizing video editing? are users all giving little input on a larger collaboration? is this wishful buzz-speak or are these things (expression, empowerment) now synonymous with democracy? (-:

p.s. can't wait to try out what you've built when I get to my desktop.

Thanks for the question and I hope you enjoy it!

What I meant by democratizing was opening up a capability to many more people than previously available due to needing expensive software or the knowledge and skills to use OSS.

Here is wikipedia's definition:

> Democratization of technology refers to the process by which access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratization_of_technology

Sometimes people ask questions when they really mean to make a statement. It's tough to be direct without blaming.

Your buzzwords, and the rest of this industry's buzzwords, are basically meaningless mumbo jumbo to all those people you are trying to sign up around the world. Equally guilty, I've used the word "container" in a thousand sentences if I've used it in one. I've also used the crap out of your service, but bailed to one of the other ones because of video quality. That's the reality of GIFy playthings.

Users should dictate what software is created for them, including and up to how it benefits from their use. If an application requires hurting a long time user to be more "successful", then it should rethink how it presents itself to the users during the marketing growth phase. I'd rather pay cryptocurrency transactions to a GIF API aggregator that does auto-bids on quality and compression times for services like this. That way, I'd get to pick what TYPE of service I wanted and the services themselves would optimize on feature quality instead of founder and VC equity.

We spent a good time brainstorming and discussing what it is we're building before we built it. It's hard to describe complex ideas and grandiose visions of the future succinctly.

Our goal is not to be a high quality image transcoding business, if that's what you are after there are many great options. Our first task was to create a tool that anyone (like our parents) could use to edit short clips of video and easily share it with their friends. However I can sympathize with the feeling of wanting higher quality media and we have several performance increases and smart mechanisms to serve the right quality to different clients that will allow us to increase the quality of our media for everyone, no auctions necessary.

Slick interface and arguably the top domain name possible. Nice!

The youtube integration and cropping is really cool as well. It took less than a minute to try it out. I can imagine this getting some heavy usage which begs the question, how do you support the costs behind this?

The video processing cpu time isn't free and the end result is an image hosting site which traditionally are impossible to monetize. What's the secret sauce for sustainability?

Koolba, thanks for the kind comment! For supporting the costs: we ended up raising $ from some awesome individuals. We've built out a team (we're hiring! [email protected]), and the team has done a lot of work to ensure that gifs/webms/mp4s are transcoded insanely fast. We've had over 4,5000,000 gifs made, and over billions of .gifs delivered, which has started to run up some cost...which leads us to sustainability: we look at the gifs player almost like the youtube embedded player, but for, well, short media. Maybe one day ever gif/webm will be in the gifs player. As we continue to build tools for empowering people to augment videos, we hope to see more people make cool short clips within our ecosystem.

> For supporting the costs: we ended up raising $ from some awesome individuals.

Okay but that's capital, not revenue.

> We've built out a team (we're hiring! [email protected]), and the team has done a lot of work to ensure that gifs/webms/mp4s are transcoded insanely fast.

A great dev team can arguably keep costs down with efficient systems but that's still not revenue. Also, dev teams cost money too so that's more expense.

> We've had over 4,5000,000 gifs made, and over billions of .gifs delivered, which has started to run up some cost

Okay sounds like some traction but I read that as about $11.5K/month of bandwidth spending[1] (just bandwidth, not counting transcoding costs).

> ...which leads us to sustainability: we look at the gifs player almost like the youtube embedded player, but for, well, short media. Maybe one day ever gif/webm will be in the gifs player. As we continue to build tools for empowering people to augment videos, we hope to see more people make cool short clips within our ecosystem.

So where's the revenue? Embedded player licensing? Intermingling ads? Changing the overlay icons for Brazzers to link straight there?

I love VC fueled fun as much as the next guy, but I'm genuinely curious what the end game is. Ride it out and hope the user base becomes worthy of an acquisition before the money burns?

[1]: 1 Billion Images x 100 KB/Image x $.12/GB[2]

[2]: Based on the IP I'm guessing they're running on GCE with rack rates for bandwidth at $.12/GB. Probably over estimating though.

I'm not Rory, our CEO who you're replying to, but he couldn't respond due to a HN "posting too fast" error so I thought I would chime in.

What we are truly passionate about is exposing the general public to a new means of expression through short form media. What we are seeing is publishers writing articles that are just lists of looping GIFs, sports fans browsing /r/nba and watching the 3 dunks and a block instead of the 3 hour game, etc... so we built our embeddable GIFs player that allows viewers to share, turn on sound, view source, and much more. It also has the benefit of using mp4 or webm format over the actual gif file which is not a good choice when compared to those modern formats. This has led to a lot of publishers using our product and the tremendous growth of people viewing media in our embedded player. Now we want to expand another segment of our user-base, the creator (who we see as the next-generation of publishers) by making a easy-to-use video editor in the cloud.

To finally answer your question, how could we generate revenue, we could show highly targeted ads during prime-time slots. Imagine the NBA finals game, people making GIFS and sharing them with captions. Nike wants to promote some new product and they use our ad platform to expose a viral campaign / advertisement on all of our media. That's just one idea but there are many other potential avenues for monetization that we are considering as well.

tl;dr we're not aiming to be an image hosting company

Really swift interface - this is an incredible tool, nice work!

Q: How come when I visit gifs.com I see a brazzers logo in the bottom right corner...?

So that gif logo in the middle of the homepage has a background of a recent and random GIF created. Looks like someone made one with the brazzers logo as a sticker.

Thanks for pointing this out though, the team had a good chuckle and it reinforced the need for a manual or better system to elect gifs that show up on the homepage.

I just leave this here as a form of sanitizing contrarianism to counter all the empty buzzword abounding in this thread.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blo...

Democratization /= fueling the televisization of the Web

I can't understand the argument of social media making the world a worse place. Television is made by publishers who get to decide what to deliver to their audience which is in stark contrast to facebook, twitter, etc... where you are in control of who you follow or friend. Additionally we don't care where you share our media, you can feel free to use it in a blog post.

The only thing we're trying to fuel is the ability of the common person to express themselves through short video. If you think that is a bad then we'll have to agree to disagree.

Wow, that's a pretty nice domain name you got there.

This is really cool! Is it possible to select a specific time range of a video via the API?

E.g. I only want the first 3 seconds of a video to be turned into a gif.

Yes this is possible, we havn't updated the docs[1] yet but the editor uses our public API for all the effects.

    {
      "source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhyANGHDDH8",
      "trim": {
        "start": 145,
        "end": 148
      }
    }

1. http://docs.gifs.com/v1.0/docs

Cool but please clamp the values to be within 0 and currentDuration.

I'm getting an error that the duration that youtube sends me back is higher than your read out duration:

{ errors: { message: 'end(8s) > currentDuration(7.383s)' } }

Good idea of just trimming to the end if the end value is greater than the video duration, I'll add that next week.

As a quick hack since the youtube video duration is 7.383s, and you want to trim to the end just omit the end property.

The interface is very easy to learn.

Found one usability issue: when starting a crop and without clicking 'check' or [x] also place a sticker or caption, the sticker or caption shows an interactivity outline but only the crop is active.

I'll forward the compliment and feedback to our UI / UX designer, thanks!

2 Issues I faced 1) The timeline moves too fast when cursor reaches right end . 2) Impossible to click on footer links ( infinite scroll )

How come the quality is different when looking at the GIF file and when looking at the default share link?

The gif is lower quality than the mp4 or webm formats which we serve on our website and the embeddable GIFS player[1] if your browser supports it.

We've chosen to prioritize speed over quality for the initial launch so at this time but are working on transcoding to various sizes and qualities to return based on the client's device size and internet speed in the player or when someone wants to share a super high quality (and file size) GIF.

1. https://gifs.com/docs/player

Hey, the site's not working for me. Possibly because the source video is long?

I'm trying to create a 10-second gif starting at 71:16 of https://gifs.com/watch?v=LW6hPl6zx5Q.

I get "Your Gif could not be created at this time.". I hope you're able to fix it, gifs.com looks fantastic. If/when it works, I'll use it a lot!

That indeed looks to be the problem, we have some ideas in store to fix this but for now source media is limited to one hour.

I filed an issue to report the correct error message and log this as an event so we could see how many times it's happening.

Sorry about that and I hope you find some other AoE videos to gif!

Cool, thanks for the quick response!

love the simplicity, replacing "youtube" in a url for "gifs". very clever.

This is true, most of the time. A gif can have super long delays in between frames, it should be possible to make a < 1kb gif that turns into > 1GB video.

We serve mp4 or webm if possible, before falling back to the gif in our embedded player. Highly recommend using that rather than the gif in an image element.

'This is true, most of the time.'

You can just stop there.