How did you make the gif in log-update?

[ghost]

Hi @sindresorhus.

I have tried a few tools to create gifs for my own projects, for example licecap. It's free and easy to use.

I noticed the gif in https://github.com/sindresorhus/log-update and was blown away by its tremendously high quality.

What tool did you use to make this?

[sindresorhus]

I resized my terminal to fill the screen and bumped up the font size. QuickTime Player → File → New Screen Recording, and recorded the terminal animation. Opened the resulting movie in Photoshop and used the Animation panel to remove all non-unique frames and then sat the frame delay manually for each frame. I did all that to optimize the size and quality of the GIF. Then exported the GIF and ran it through ImageOptim.

Usually I don't go through Photoshop though, but rather record with QuickTime Player and then edit and export with GIF Brewery.

[ghost]

Impressive process. Thank you!

[lukechilds]

@sindresorhus If you fancy a CLI alternative to GIF Brewery I've neatened up the shell script I use and put it on GitHub, quality should be on par.

lukechilds/gifgen

[sindresorhus]

@lukechilds It doesn't do cropping, trimming, or quality settings though, which are the main reasons I use GIF Brewery (Totally worth the price btw).

For CLI, I've heard gifify is pretty good.

[lukechilds]

@sindresorhus more settings to come, I only cleaned it up for public the other day ;)

Thanks for the link to gifify, it looks pretty cool. Looks like it just uses ffmpeg's default palette though, so you get the typical GIF graphical artefacts that you can see in their demo GIF. gifgen creates a custom palette based on the input video to prevent this.

I'll deffo check out GIF Brewery 👍