If you're a young person on the Internet, you've likely been down this tough road before. You have an idea for an awesome animated GIF—the kind that will rack up likes, karma, or other worthless points on your social-media site of choice—but once you find your ideal video source, you're stymied by getting GIF-fy with it. You have to hunt for weird third-party services that take too long to export and process your desired clip, all while being bombarded by ads (and possibly dealing with a dumb watermark on the GIF of your dreams).

This week, YouTube followed through on November plans to cut out the middle-man and rolled out a limited test version of its new GIF creator, which allows fans to make a six-second GIF from any compatible clip. Though YouTube officially announced the idea in a November "creator preview" demo, the launch came this week, as intrepid YouTube user Andy Baio found the GIF menu hidden in the "share" portion of a PBS Idea Channel video.

The functionality is simple and limited, with the most impressive feature being the ability to add text to both the top and bottom of the output GIF (in the popular Impact font seen in most image macros, at that). Otherwise, attributes like animation speed and size can't be tweaked, and users can't seek through a video and create a GIF out of mulitple scenes; their ideal GIF will need to contain footage from a single, concurrent chunk.

A YouTube representative didn't have answers about other possible output formats—such as the newly popular GIFV format introduced by imgur this October—nor any information about when to expect a wider rollout of the GIF output feature. For now, the feature appears to be tied to creators enabling it, and interested YouTube channel operators can sign up for Google's GIF Beta sign-up at this form.