

Quick aside: It might so happen that you don’t have any civilised fonts (e.g. For that, we can use the -annotate feature of ImageMagick. Time to check the output images again if they aren’t how you like, you might try fiddling with the parameters in the previous command until it looks better.Ī typical thing you might need to do at this point is label some of the frames. Open a terminal and change to the directory with your movie file, and assuming whatever.mov is the filename: Then, it’s time to extract the images with ffmpeg. If it’s video, you can crop/trim it down to the relevant clip with Quicktime X or any more advanced video-editing suite.

The full workflowįirst, you want to start with your source video or images.

You only really need ffmpeg if you have a video source file, though everything else is done with ImageMagick. Depending on how idealistic your distro is, it might require adding some non-free repositories or even compiling ffmpeg from scratch.
IMAGEMAGICK ANIMATED GIF HOW TO
If you don’t, try installing HomeBrew which is a little more lightweight, and run a brew install imagemagick ffmpeg.įor Linuxes, I’ll leave you to figure out how to get those two packages from your package manager. If you’re on a Mac, and you already use MacPorts, it should be a simple sudo port install ImageMagick ffmpeg and a lot of thumb twiddling. You won’t be able to jump into this without a little comfort on the command line, and the installation of ffmpeg (if you are working from a video source) and ImageMagick. I haven’t plunked down $6 for that yet, so I’ve still been trekking about on the command line, which is certainly more tedious, but you can control every step of the process and get exactly the results you want.
IMAGEMAGICK ANIMATED GIF FOR MAC
On Windows, Paint Shop/Animation Shop used to be the go-to suite for doing this-now, the closest thing for Mac folks might be GIFBrewery, which has far less features and some mixed reviews. Surprisingly, there are few good tools for making animated GIFs on a Mac or Linux desktop. I’ll start off this blog with something lightweight and relatively useless except for creating amusing internet gimmicks and perhaps the occasional animated diagram.
