Screen Recording to GIF

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license: gpl-3.0

README.md

If you haven’t already:

brew install ffmpeg gifsicle

Open QuickTime Player. File > New Screen Recording. Record. Trim as needed. Save as foo.mov.

First compute a good color palette:

ffmpeg -i foo.mov -vf 'scale=-1:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen' foo-palette.png

Then make your GIF:

ffmpeg -i foo.mov -i foo-palette.png -filter_complex 'scale=-1:-1:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse' foo.gif

To drop frames, add fps=10, to the -filter_complex argument.

To crop, add crop=width:height:x:y, to the -filter_complex argument.

See also https://superuser.com/questions/556029/how-do-i-convert-a-video-to-gif-using-ffmpeg-with-reasonable-quality.

I really like the 5€ GIFBrewery tool for creating a gif from a movie file, because it has a bunch of handy functions build in, such as captions and conversion properties. I'm sure you can do all this with free tools, but this one is designed well and works.