Creating GIFs from .MOV files in OSX using FFmpeg and ImageMagick

OSX-Convert-MOV-GIF.md

Convert MOV to GIF using FFmpeg and ImageMagick

I tried a few different techniques to make a GIF via command-line and the following gives me the best control of quality and size. Once you're all setup, you'll be pumping out GIFs in no time!

Preparation

Install FFmpeg

• $ brew install ffmpeg [all your options]
  • Example: $ brew install ffmpeg --with-fdk-aac --with-ffplay --with-freetype --with-frei0r --with-libass --with-libvo-aacenc --with-libvorbis --with-libvpx --with-opencore-amr --with-openjpeg --with-opus --with-rtmpdump --with-schroedinger --with-speex --with-theora --with-tools

Install ImageMagick

• $ brew install imagemagick

Now convert!

Grab screenshot from Quicktime (or what you want. I like Screenflow)

• Open Quicktime > File > New Screen Recordering > After recording 'Save'

Use ffmpeg to slice .mov into high quality .png's

• $ ffmpeg -i screencast.mov -vf scale=320:-1 -r 10 output/ffout%3d.png
  • 'screencast.mov' location of .mov
  • 'scale=320' set scale to what you want
  • '-r 10' set framerate
  • 'output/ffout%3d.png' output pngs in output folder

Use Convert from ImageMagick

• $ convert -delay 8 -loop 0 output/ffout*.png output/animation.gif
• 'convert' is the command-line tool from ImageMagick
• '-dalay' is the delay of 8, you would get a FPS=100/8=12.5
• '-loop' adds Netscape loop extension to your GIF animation
• 'output/ffout*.png' is the directory and file names going into the GIF
• 'output/animation.gif' is the final location and GIF output

Resources

• http://ffmpeg.org/
• http://www.imagemagick.org/

Great Articles

• https://gist.github.com/dergachev/4627207
• http://superuser.com/questions/556029/ffmpeg-converts-flv-video-to-gif-with-awful-quality

I found that for a screencast, using the above convert command resulted in the white background of the window in the screencast flickering between different shades of white.

From http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt/#colortables:

The command line solution is a special +map option, that does a global color reduction to a common palette that is added to all images.

This fixed it right up!

This was very helpful, thank you for posting! However, I ran into a number of issues as a result of the limited colour palette for the multiple PNG versions in the conversion to GIF that resulted in a very dull output. You can achieve much richer colour results using ffmpeg directly and ignoring the ImageMagick step. See this post

What does $ brew install ffmpeg [all your options] mean?
You list a lot of options below that, but don't specify which ones are required to convert from MOV to GIF.

I have MacOS Mojave, and brew install ffmpeg fails: Error: You are using macOS 10.14.
The ImageMagick install worked as above: brew install imagemagick

I was able to install ffmpeg using:

$ xcode-select --install ; #  <-- I did this but it may not have been needed.
$ curl https://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-4.1.tar.bz2 | tar xjf -
$ cd ffmpe*
$ ./configure --disable-asm
$ make
$ sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/bin
$ make install
$ sudo chown -R root /usr/local/bin
$ make clean

From there all of the mov to gif commands above worked just fine.
Thanks for this gist!

fyi: Here was my resulting ffmpeg and ImageMagick versions:

$ ffmpeg -version
ffmpeg version 4.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2018 the FFmpeg developers
built with Apple LLVM version 10.0.0 (clang-1000.11.45.5)
configuration: --disable-asm
libavutil      56. 22.100 / 56. 22.100
libavcodec     58. 35.100 / 58. 35.100
libavformat    58. 20.100 / 58. 20.100
libavdevice    58.  5.100 / 58.  5.100
libavfilter     7. 40.101 /  7. 40.101
libswscale      5.  3.100 /  5.  3.100
libswresample   3.  3.100 /  3.  3.100
$ convert -version
Version: ImageMagick 7.0.7-31 Q16 x86_64 2018-05-07 https://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: © 1999-2018 ImageMagick Studio LLC
License: https://www.imagemagick.org/script/license.php
Features: Cipher DPC HDRI Modules
Delegates (built-in): bzlib freetype jng jpeg ltdl lzma png tiff xml zlib