The best way to convert a screen recording (or any video) to a gif both in quality and size

A gif of a screen recording has proven itself to be a very practical solution to make tutorials easier to understand. The gif has the big advantage that you don’t need to think about a video-player for your blog or host each small video on a video hosting platform like YouTube.

I’ve tested many solutions to convert videos to gifs to receive nice quality with a relatively small size. Some software solutions I tried are GIF Brewery, Cloud App, GifMaker, GifFox, Drop to GIF but all of them had some drawback, either the file size turned out to be to big or the quality was disappointing.

The solution I found unfortunately can only be used with the terminal, but don’t be afraid, I’ll guide you through it.

Installing the prerequisites brew & ffmpeg

The converting is done via ffmpeg a open-source software that can do pretty much anything related to video/audio. So it doesn’t hurt to have it on your machine.

Step 1) Install brew

I’ve found that the easiest way to install ffmpeg on a mac is actually with brew, the so called „missing package manager for OS X“.

So head over to brew and install it by copying the command shown into a fresh terminal window. (Terminal is a preinstalled Application, if you’ve never heard of it. Just locate it in your Applications folder and open it)

Step 2) Install ffmpeg

Once brew is installed you can just type one simple command to install ffmpeg into a terminal window:

brew install ffmpeg

Using ffmpeg to convert to gif

I’ve found this very helpful blog-post which explains in detail what’s going on in the background. I’ve just extracted the most important part for you. How to use the script.

I've made an Automator Workflow based on the infos

You can just download the workflow and install it on your mac and use it from there.