
Show HN: Cloud-based GIF editor to augment any video - anonfunction
https://gifs.com/?source=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5JnHDPyEBk
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anonfunction
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.

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

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GifsOfficial
Thanks for the kind words Ian!

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koolba
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?

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GifsOfficial
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!
rory@gifs.com), 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.

~~~
koolba
> 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! rory@gifs.com), 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._

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anonfunction
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

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prezjordan
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...?

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anonfunction
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.

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camillomiller
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...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blogfather-
facebook-instagram-and-twitter-are-killing-the-web)

Democratization /= fueling the televisization of the Web

~~~
anonfunction
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.

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

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intruder
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.

~~~
anonfunction
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](http://docs.gifs.com/v1.0/docs)

~~~
intruder
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)' } }

~~~
anonfunction
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.

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karmakaze
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.

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

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

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

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anonfunction
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](https://gifs.com/docs/player)

~~~
arcticfox
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](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!

~~~
anonfunction
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!

~~~
arcticfox
Cool, thanks for the quick response!

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

