Convert video (.mp4 or other) to high quality animated gif

Alec Jacobson

September 12, 2011

weblog/

You can do this directly with ffmpeg, but I had trouble with it and seem to remember the quality not being so good. Instead I convert my .mp4 video into an animated gif by first grabbing 10 frames every second and saving them to files using the following:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -r 10 output%05d.png

Then using imagemagick's convert tool insert each frame into an animated gif:

convert output*.png output.gif

This makes a rather large .gif file for even modest videos so probably you'll want to post process it (e.g. with Photoshop) to reduce the file size by compressing the .gif file or reducing the dimensions. Clean up the png files using:

rm output*.png

Comments

September 12, 2011, Colin

Couldn't you also reduce the size with convert using the -colors flag and/or -resize to make it smaller? What else is Photoshop doing to reduce the size?