Show your projects in motion with animated GIFs | Hacker News Reader

Show your projects in motion with animated GIFs

blog.github.com

38 pointsguessmyname14 comments

The first gif in the page is 7.31 MB. It's 13 seconds long.

    ffmpeg -i asdf.gif -c:v libvpx-vp9 -crf 20 -b:v 1500k output.webm

I get a 999KB webm of the same quality. It would probaby go lower if there weren't gif compression artifacts in the original.

Imgur solved this problem years ago by just converting gifs to mp4's and webm's and calling them 'gifv's. afaik reddit does the same. I cannot imagine the amount of unneeded bandwidth this will create and how many devs with lesser internet access will yet again have to wait more. Even mobile data plans of today are just dumb small.

Not to mention that I can do all the effects the gif does in sony vegas without too much effort.

`Many of the GIFs featured on the GitHub blog and social media begin as 24fps video files. This frame rate, combined with a bit of motion blur, helps give the action in the animation a more cinematic feel. Those videos get imported into Adobe Photoshop, where they can be tweaked frame-by-frame. There are a variety of helpful tutorials about this process available online. From Photoshop, it’s possible to compare the resulting file size and image quality of multiple export settings combinations at once. This helps show you where you have room for a bit of extra dithering or how a more limited color palette will hold up.`

Captain, it appears the ship is going backwards. All of our thrusters have turned to irony mode.

There once was an issue on github about supporting video in READMEs, but an employee said that they had no plans to do so, which resulted in lots of drama and many "thumbs down". Unfortunately, I can't find the issue anymore, so I guess it was deleted.

ScreenFlow, a great pro product for macOS, outputs great animated GIFs (just turn off dithering!), with control over framerate, final scaling, etc.

And you can decide any time whether a video or a GIF would suit you best (or both, for different needs).

(Just a happy customer.)

This is an interesting blog post about creating high quality Animated GIFs with ScreenFlow: https://framer.com/blog/posts/how-to-create-high-quality-gif...

Icecream Screen Recorder is one of the best tools for this.

Yes the name sounds nice and malware-ish but seems legit and works a charm. In particular it outputs webm format and allows the screen capture to follow the mouse which is something lacking in many free tools.

https://icecreamapps.com/Screen-Recorder/

As others have pointed out, GIFs are huge. They're also limited to 256 colours, and generally look crappy. I'm using the technique that Sublime Text uses on its homepage [0]. There's a lot more faffing around producing them, but the results are excellent.

    [0] https://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way.html.

> Content-Length: 7666451

No thanks!

Huh?

The gif they posted is massive, is what GP is saying.

While Animated GIFs are very inefficient by todays standards, they still have several advantages over all modern video formats:

  - GIF lacks audio support so it's guaranteed to be silent
  - The crappy compression forces creators to keep their clips short
  - GIFs can often be uploaded/attached on platforms that only support images but no video for some reason 
    (like GitHub issues for instance)

Some of those features are actually limitations but IMO there are a lot of use cases for a format that sits between still images and full blown video.

I maintain a screen recording app for macOS that has a very efficient aGIF exporter: https://www.peakstep.com/claquette/

The GIFs on the product page are between 130 and 400 KB.

Lacking a feature that can just be disabled by the platform isn't really an advantage. I don't know why forcing things to be short by risk of large files is a good thing. Sharing gifs in image platforms is easier but the bandwidth skyrockets and is not an efficient way to communicate information. Platforms should be implimenting video support, not saying 'x platforms don't do it so we shouldnt'. The social media world has already solved the issue, why can't these sites.

https://cloudinary.com/blog/evolution_of_img_gif_without_the...

Not sure what audience the author had in mind; I already do a lot of gif recording and would have appreciated more talk about composition and less about how to capture gifs. Seems to me to be aimed at social media folk (probably the background of the author?)

I thought a site like github would render the gif as a video to the client, gif is very inefficient.

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