A 1080p MP4 can balloon into a 20 MB GIF if you copy every frame. The browser encoder here is built to stay usable: it scales to your width setting and samples a capped number of frames.
The three levers
- Time — two seconds at 10 fps is 20 frames. Eight seconds is 80. Cut aggressively.
- Width — 640px is already wide for a chat GIF. 320px often looks fine on a phone.
- FPS — 15 fps is the ceiling here. Most memes look fine at 8–10.
Why GIF is still bulky
GIF stores a 256-color palette per frame structure, with no modern video compression. That is why a five-second joke can out-weigh the source MP4. If you need a long clip, keep MP4 or use a silent WebM.
When this tool will refuse
Files over 80 MB, more than five videos in the list, or a file the browser cannot decode (some rare codecs). Re-export as H.264 MP4 if playback itself fails.