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Run this command to further reduce the size: Further Reducing the Size Using Gifsicle (Optional)Īlthough we have reduced the size of the GIF by reducing the frame rate and scaling down the video, the size can be further reduced by using Gifsicle, a command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIFs. The values of these two arguments can be tweaked depending on the quality and size of the GIF you need. The height is set to -1 to keep the aspect ratio and will be set automatically.įile sizes before and after reducing frame rate and scaling downįrom the comparison above, it can be noticed that reducing the frame rate and size of the video before converting it to a GIF reduces the size of the GIF significantly from 7.0MB to 1.1MB. scale resizes the video where the first parameter is the width and the second one is the height.fps specifies the frame rate of the output GIF.The palette is generated by adding the following argument to the basic FFmpeg conversion command:įfmpeg -ss 23.0 -t 1.8 -i input.mp4 -i palette.png -filter_complex " fps=10,scale=320:-1 paletteuse" output_trimmed_enhanced_reduced.gif It extracts a color palette of the video by creating a base image and applying all changes as layers on top of the base image. The palettegen filter is a filter that generates a 256-color palette to be used in GIF encoding. Enhancementįrom FFmpeg v2.6 and above, it has two important filters which are very useful in creating a high-quality GIF: palettegen and paletteuse. However, we can use the palettegen and paletteuse filters of FFmpeg to generate a custom palette from the colors in our original video to create a higher-quality GIF. By default, FFmpeg uses a generic 256-color palette for every GIF encoding and doesn’t take into account the colors in the input video. This causes the compression to be less efficient and takes up more space.īesides that, the quality of the GIF is also suboptimal as a GIF file is limited to only 256 colors. H.264, H.265) and only encodes changes from frame to frame, every frame in the GIF file is coded on its own.
GIFSICLE MAC MP4
This is because, unlike the original MP4 video which is usually coded in a lossy format (eg. Even the file size of the 1.8-second GIF (3.8MB) is also larger than the original video which is around 2 minutes long.Ī comparison of the sizes of the input video and the output GIFs If you compare the size of the original video and the GIF output, you will notice that the file size of the GIF (112MB) is significantly larger than the original video (3MB). However, we will face a couple of issues when converting a video to a GIF using FFmpeg: size and quality. For a better understanding, you may refer to the illustration below:Īn illustration of trimming a snippet from a video Issue The two arguments must be inserted before input -i, and they are dependent on which part of the video you want to convert to a GIF. The command below will convert your video to a GIF and save it in the same folder as the input video:įfmpeg -ss 23.0 -t 1.8 -i input.mp4 output_trimmed.gif Gifsicle (Optional, to further reduce the size of the GIF).FFmpeg ( ≥ v2.6) (The palettegen and paletteuse filters are only available from FFmpeg v2.6 onwards).In this tutorial, we will be using the FFmpeg command-line tool to convert a video in MP4 format to an animated GIF with the help of the palettegen and paletteuse filters, so make sure you have the correct version of FFmpeg as stated in the “Pre-requisite” section below installed. It contains multiple tools for end-users to convert, play and analyze media files and libraries for developers to use in different applications.
GIFSICLE MAC MAC OS
It is also highly portable as it compiles and runs in a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations like Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, etc.
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It can decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much any media file in any format.
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What is FFmpegįFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.
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It can be done in just one line but multiple enhancements can be made to output GIF results of different sizes and qualities, depending on what you need. You can do this in the command line and it’s really simple! In this tutorial, we will show you an easy way to convert a video clip to a GIF using FFmpeg. Hey! Have you ever seen some funny or cute videos and wanted to send them as GIFs to your friends like this one here? 👇🏻
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