How I create compressed GIFs of screen recordings

The other day I needed to upload a screen recording to report a bug¹. Here’s how I produced a compressed GIF.

1. Record the screen with the macOS built-in screen capture: ⌘⇧5
2. Rename/copy the screen recording to input.mov
3. ffmpeg -i input.mov -vf "scale=1470:956,fps=10" -pix_fmt rgb8 output1.gif
4. gifsicle -O3 output1.gif -o output2.gif

The output doesn’t look great but you can still tell what’s going on. Most importantly, the 20–25 second capture was reduced to ~2 MB.

In the future, I can improve this method by making the scaling more flexible. For example, it would be nice if it could scale to be 2x smaller, regardless of the original aspect ratio.

1. Vim cursor disappears when following an internal link to a new tab - Bug reports - Obsidian Forum ↩