Animated Gifs

Creating animated gifs from a video file

• Resize your video.
  • ffmpeg -i complete-graph.mp4 -filter:v scale=500:490 -c:a copy complete-graph-small.mp4
  • (Change scale to the actual size you want.)
• Create a palette from your video. (When I went straight to making gif, things got muddy.)
  • ffmpeg -i complete-graph-small.mp4 -vf fps=15,scale=500:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen palette.png
• Use the palette to create the gif.
  • ffmpeg -i complete-graph-small.mp4 -i palette.png -filter_complex "fps=15,scale=420:476:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse" -ignore_loop 0 complete-graph.gif
  • ignore_loop tells ffmpeg to ignore the looping setting from the input video. By default, it will loop gifs infinitely, but videos usually say not to loop, so ffmpeg will respect that unless told otherwise.

Making the animated gif play faster than the source video

ffmpeg -i crabbington-0.ogv -i palette.png -filter_complex "setpts=0.5*PTS,fps=15,scale=768:-1:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse" -ignore_loop 0 crabbington-preview.gif

Creating an animated gif from images with ImageMagick

• Resize your images to a reasonable size.
  • e.g. convert -resize 1024x1024 steak1.jpg steak1.jpg
  • Or convert -resize 25% steak1.jpg steak1.jpg
  • Or crop with: convert -crop 640x480+200+100 steak1.jpg steak1.jpg
• Combine them into an animated gif.
  • convert -loop 0 -delay 100 steak*.jpg grill-rotation.gif
    • This will put a 1-second delay in between frames.
• Add -dispose 2 if you have transparent images and don't want to have them carry over into future frames.