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Since there may be people in the know ... Is ffmpeg an appropriate tool to make gifs? Or are there more appropriate tools? (to designate static regions in a sce

by geokon 3y ago

Since there may be people in the know ... Is ffmpeg an appropriate tool to make gifs? Or are there more appropriate tools? (to designate static regions in a scene for instance )

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
There are better tools, not that I know them. The most ffmpeg can do is generate a palette and use it to make 256 color video which is then fed into the gif encoder.
sorenjan 3y ago
ScreenToGif has a very nice editor that can make cinemagraphs, remove duplicate frames, etc. ffmpeg can make gifs, but I don't know how you would do stuff like static regions. It could probably be done with some masking and filtering, but I think you would need to make the mask separately so why not use a GUI gif editor instead? https://www.screentogif.com/ https://www.screentogif.com/
Groxx 3y ago
It's an effective first stage... and with enough wizardry you can optimize it a fair bit too. Personally I crop, resize, time-slice, and dump to gif with no other arguments... and then just use gifsicle. Gifsicle is absolutely amazing, both significantly better results and significantly easier.
abetusk 3y ago
Yes, I wrote a blog post about it, though the post is quite old now and maybe there are other better ways [0]. In short, ffmpeg can be used directly to create a gif: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 large_output.gif but it can be quite large. You can also use the appropriate "start" and "duration" options to selectively get a portion out. Animated gifs are pretty inefficient as it is so I'm usually happy with the above, and make sure to only restrict to 5-10s max, but there are other programs to try and help reduce the size, like gifsicle [1] and imagemagick [2]. [0] https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Screenshots-Screencasts-Animated-Gifs.html https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Screenshots-Screencasts-Animat... [1] https://github.com/kohler/gifsicle https://github.com/kohler/gifsicle [2] https://imagemagick.org/index.php https://imagemagick.org/index.php

by geokon 3y ago

Since there may be people in the know ... Is ffmpeg an appropriate tool to make gifs? Or are there more appropriate tools? (to designate static regions in a scene for instance )

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago

There are better tools, not that I know them. The most ffmpeg can do is generate a palette and use it to make 256 color video which is then fed into the gif encoder.

sorenjan 3y ago

ScreenToGif has a very nice editor that can make cinemagraphs, remove duplicate frames, etc. ffmpeg can make gifs, but I don't know how you would do stuff like static regions. It could probably be done with some masking and filtering, but I think you would need to make the mask separately so why not use a GUI gif editor instead? https://www.screentogif.com/ https://www.screentogif.com/

Groxx 3y ago

It's an effective first stage... and with enough wizardry you can optimize it a fair bit too. Personally I crop, resize, time-slice, and dump to gif with no other arguments... and then just use gifsicle. Gifsicle is absolutely amazing, both significantly better results and significantly easier.

abetusk 3y ago

Yes, I wrote a blog post about it, though the post is quite old now and maybe there are other better ways [0]. In short, ffmpeg can be used directly to create a gif: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 large_output.gif but it can be quite large. You can also use the appropriate "start" and "duration" options to selectively get a portion out. Animated gifs are pretty inefficient as it is so I'm usually happy with the above, and make sure to only restrict to 5-10s max, but there are other programs to try and help reduce the size, like gifsicle [1] and imagemagick [2]. [0] https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Screenshots-Screencasts-Animated-Gifs.html https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Screenshots-Screencasts-Animat... [1] https://github.com/kohler/gifsicle https://github.com/kohler/gifsicle [2] https://imagemagick.org/index.php https://imagemagick.org/index.php