I'm Morgan McGuire (@CasualEffects). I've been working on computer graphics and games for 20 years at great places including NVIDIA, University of Waterloo, Williams College, Brown University, Roblox, Unity, and Activision.

See my home page for a full index of my blog posts, books, research, and projects.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Screen Capture Animated GIF on OS X

Animated GIF is a terrible video format: a 256 color palette with a low compression ratio that trashes bandwidth and still looks bad. Unfortunately, browser vendors failed to agree on a modern video standard and many APIs (including Twitter and most HTML tags) don't support video in any format in place of images, so Animated GIF is the best that there is for embedding video inside other APIs.

Short animated GIFs suitable for posting on Twitter are simple and free to create on OS X.  I use the free OS X App Screen Record Pro-Lite to capture a QuickTime (MOV) format video of a screen region and then convert the MOV to GIF online at http://www.online-convert.com/. To produce an MP4 video instead, I could convert the MOV online or using iMovie.

I haven't been able to post animated GIF files to Twitter via their web interface, but the (also free) official Twitter app for OS X allows posting them by dragging the GIF into a new tweet window.





Morgan McGuire is a professor of Computer Science at Williams College and a professional game developer. He is the author of The Graphics Codex, an essential reference for computer graphics that runs on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.
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