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[colossalwreck]

I've been trying a few methods to create gifs and none gives the desired quality + size. So I would like to hear about your gif creating workflow.

[Clipper]

LICECap and GifCam are two examples of programs for making screenGIFs, if that's what you're looking for.

[zuzu]

licecap

[DireLogomachist]

Will second licecap

[neutonm]

Photoshop goes well with exporting gifs.
Capture it with whatever, but i found Bandicam to be fast in doing quick captures. There is that feature where you can capture designated area on screen, not all just all screen.

And there is this magnificent website for making gifs - https://ezgif.com
You can upload video, insta gif it and tweak to your needs.

[oahda]

Agreed on LICEcap for capture. Then ezgif as mentioned above is a nice place to optimise or resize the GIF. Sometimes I remove a few frames in GIMP as well, to make it loop perfectly, or to reduce the file size, which of course you can do in PS too.

[darkhog]

I'm using ScreenToGIF: http://www.screentogif.com/

I've found gifs produced by Licecap to be too big and of bad quality and the software tends to lag on my system whereas ScreenToGif is generating quality gifs at low resource usage. Additional good thing about it is that it has a simple video editor built-in which allows you to remove superfluous frames, add captions and so on.

[jeremiah]

Awesome. I need to try something other than LICECap. It works as far as it goes, but I too see a lot of lag, bad quality, and often a weird colored line on one of the edges.

[dlan]

I use a mix of Apitrace and VirtualDub (it's rather old but work well enough for my use ) . I didn't got the results I wanted with LICECap, and was frustrated with the performance / options of usual capture software like fraps.

Apitrace is used to capture OpenGL/D3D calls in a trace file and output game sequences as PNG files for each frame. Then I load the first PNG file in VirtualDub and do all the cropping / editing I need here before exporting it as a GIF. It give me a good enough size / quality ratio.

[ThemsAllTook]

Apitrace is used to capture OpenGL/D3D calls in a trace file and output game sequences as PNG files for each frame.

Whoa, that's super cool. I've been in so many situations where I wished I had a tool for that. Definitely going to be trying this out.

[darkhog]

Awesome. I need to try something other than LICECap. It works as far as it goes, but I too see a lot of lag, bad quality, and often a weird colored line on one of the edges.

Yeah, that's precisely the issue I've had with LICEcap. ScreenToGif is easiest to use and giving best results tool for this. Haven't seen a better gif screen recorder and with added bonus of a simple video editor that allows you to cut the gif to remove extra frames and add things like captions and what not, it really makes it the best tool for it.

Funnily enough I've found about ScreenToGif before I did about LICECap (which I've tried only because I've seen indie devs recommending it), but after using LICECap, I can safely say that it's almost as bad as the insect it has in the name .

Anyway, for the difference in quality between the two, I think ScreenToGif has probably a better encoding and dithering algorithm than LICECap (remember, gifs are only 256 colors, 255 if gif is transparent) and that's why it gets better results. As far as speed goes, my theory is that LICECap tries to capture entire screen, then crop it to necessary area, while ScreenToGif only captures given area in the first place.

[tetract]

I use ImageMagick https://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php , the most classical image processing tool i think, but it's command line.

[quantumpotato]

I use ImageMagick https://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php , the most classical image processing tool i think, but it's command line.

So.. do you have a spell you run to convert like 10 seconds to 12 seconds from a video into a gif? And specify the rectangle resolutions of the video too?

imagemagick gif ~/foo.mov -tstart 10000 -tend 12000 .. etc, something lik ethat?

[powly]

I only wish to create videos/gifs that are recordings of my programs so I've been doing ffmpeg-piping for quite a while. With pixel unpack buffers (or the D3D equivalent, can't recall name) the performance is pretty good, especially if you downsample first. The neat thing about this is that after some hassle with unique file name generation you can just have a record button and out comes an mp4 or a gif or whatever that you can then upload and show to everyone (the next logical step would be automatic upload to somewhere and inserting the link directly into clipboard).

[Samaras-Sama]

screen2gif