this is a note I made after experimenting (halfway) with various tools while looking for an alternative to photoshop in gif-making. the reason I am not using photoshop is because I have an old macbook with a very limited storage space, and I need to prioritize the installation of apps for research.
14/7
pure ffmpeg: it looks complicated so I am checking with vapoursynth and maybe trying to use vapoursynth + ffmpeg
13:55 --- installing vapoursynth via homebrew, on MacOS Monterey 12.7.6 Intel graphics --- brew install vapoursynth
14:37 --- i GaVE Up. it took too long to install the dependency: llvm. this happened to me before with ffmpeg because it's installing from source. it took 6 hours and it's not even finished! so I install via packaged ffmpeg for macOS. and i don't wanna go trough this again. looking for other options right now... --- did brew cleanup and brew autoremove
15:03 --- trying this vs installation tutorial from hackmd.io.
15:51 --- this is a slightly late update but I successfully installed vs on macOS.
[resting...]
00:00 --- finally got to try it. resized the video in vs and converted it to a gif using ffmpeg via terminal. just a quick test and it turned out pretty okay-ish. no specific tweaks like sharpening, color adjustment, or anything. will document again tomorrow (or later today). I made cat gifs.
[resting...]
15/7
22:05 --- just a quick update. after I managed to gif'ed something last night, I tried again today and my vs broke hahahahahahaha idk something error happening. too busy to check. will probably reinstall if (after several hours) I'm too lazy to find the workaround.
16/7
17:05 --- well, suddenly it's working now. resized/cropped a video using vs, convert to gif using ffmpeg.
> ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "fps=25,scale=540:400:flags=lanczos,palettegen" -y palette.png > ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i palette.png -filter_complex "fps=25,scale=540:400:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse" -y output.gif
maybe it's too complicated. just use ezgif, guys...
