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Comment by s1k3s | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what software they use to make these short demo videos? I see them in lots of app landing pages and I'm curious how to make them.

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Minus the background color, the drop shadow is the same as how it looks when you do this in QuickTime > New Screen Recording > Capture Selected Window.

On macOS, you can use Quicktime which lets you also select a geometric region within the screen. Then, you can edit, crop and so forth in iMovie. Finally, you can use ffmpeg to convert to gif.

The following command works well:

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "fps=10" -loop 0 out.gif

To be clear, the loop 0 will make the gif infinitely loop. By setting a number n, it will set the gif to loop n times.

I've done this but I've still never figured out the magic sauce to get a gif with a good balance of file size and quality. And gifs seem to have some kind of trick I don't understand with framerate cause sometimes a 30fps gif I made will play in slow motion, and at first I think it's that it's just slowly loading, but even after it's fully loaded it still plays slowed down.

gifs just constantly remind me that they're not made for what we used them for these days

gifski does a great job at being relatively simple, while handling quality stuff for you.

https://gif.ski/

gifski --fps 10 --width 320 -o anim.gif video.mp4

> On macOS, you can use Quicktime which lets you also select a geometric region within the screen.

Or Command + Shift + 5

Thanks, it seems like Quicktime + iMovie is what I was looking for.

Worth noting, if all you need to do is trim the video, Quicktime can do this quickly out of the box without iMovie (Cmd+T to trim)

A lot of the time I find this preferable because iMovie is not very flexible with video aspect ratios/resolutions

No problem!

Gif makes sense as an output format but your question may be what software to use to capture & edit the screen activity.

Even with all the other options, my favorite is still ScreenFlow. It has a lot of editing features… basically uMovie for screen recordings.

animated gifs. lots of free tools available. substack probably has staff designers to make it extra pretty.

I use gifski, it's perfect: https://gif.ski/

Can gifski handle the initial recording (e.g. selecting an area of your monitor and recording)? Or is it just for converting other recordings into gif?

It's just for converting. For the actual recording I use the built-in functionality in macOS, it's pretty great: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721

Negative. Just a converter.

this seems really nice.

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