For ClearWater’s blog post about our new map collaboration, we created some simple screencasts as animated GIFs. Animated GIFs are a simple way to demonstrate functionality in a blog post. Creating them was a little tricky, here are the tools I used (on a mac — would welcome tips about how to do this on Windows):
Screencastify (free) Chrome extension to record the screencasts as webm.
Handbrake (free) to convert the webm to mp4 so it could be used in the next step. I used the highest settings to preserve quality – file size does not matter, since this is just an intermediate step.
Gif Brewery ($4.99) to convert the mp4 into a GIF. You can resize, trim the video, and select framerate. I chose automatic / 10fps to match the original video.
GifQuickMaker ($0.99) for fine-tuning the GIF frame-by-frame. In this case I added a pause to the first and last frame.
And the final result:
An easier way to do this would be to upload to Youtube directly from Screencastify and convert to GIF using yt2gif or similar, but this would now allow the same control over the output in terms of framerate, size, and timing.