Create a gif from a video using ffmpeg with good quality

Background

In the last post, we saw to Resizing videos and images using ffmpeg. In this post, we will see how we can convert a video into a gif with good quality.

 Create a gif from a video using FFmpeg

You can use the following shell script to convert your video to Gif -

#!/bin/bash
#----------------------------------------------------
#  Author : athakur
#  Version : 1.0
#  Create Date : 27/02/2018
#  Update Date : 27/02/2018
#  Description : Create gif from a video
#    Sample usage : ./creategif.sh input.mp4 output.gif
# ffmpeg static build can be downloaded from https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/
#----------------------------------------------------
echo "Converting $1 to $2"

if [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ]
  then
  echo "Incorrect arguments supplied. Format - ./creategif.sh input.mp4 output.gif"
  exit
fi

palette="/tmp/palette.png"

filters="fps=10,scale=1024:-1:flags=lanczos"

ffmpeg -v warning -i "$1" -vf "$filters,palettegen" -y "$palette"
ffmpeg -v warning -i "$1" -i $palette -lavfi "$filters [x]; [x][1:v] paletteuse" -y "$2"

echo "Completed gif creation" 

You can find this code in my GitHub gists section-

• https://gist.github.com/aniket91/c08ad48b1968dbcfa48cdb72188e5bba

 To run you can simply execute following command - 

• ./creategif.sh input.mp4 output.gif

Input need not be an mp4. It can be an .avi or a .webm too.

Sample video and gif are as follows -

Video :

Gif :

That's it your high-quality gif is ready.

You can do more with FFmpeg like scaling and cropping of video before converting to gig. Eg.

./ffmpeg -loglevel warning -y -i input.mp4 -i palette.png -filter_complex "crop=800:500:0:0[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse=dither=bayer:bayer_scale=3[tl];[tl]fps=10,scale=1024:-1:flags=lanczos"  target.gif

Related Links

•  Resizing videos and images using ffmpeg(OSFG)
• https://gist.github.com/aniket91/c08ad48b1968dbcfa48cdb72188e5bba