I notice that some people include GIF files to show how things are done in SU here.
Can anyone recommend software for doing that or point me in the direction to look?
I tried one simple GIF maker but it changes the cursor when you are inside the recording window and assumes you are doing something to the GIF rather than the underlying window of SU.
I use LiceCap for the GIF captures I post. It doesn’t seem to have any problem with displaying the cursors.
At your suggestion, have just downloaded LiceCap and tried it out. I must have the settings wrong. It does record but when I play back, it doesn’t seem to be animated any longer. Or else the time is not real time. I guess it needs more playing with.
See here for example:
Oh, hold on, it worked fine once it was embedded! That’s odd.
Try opening the GIF in your internet browser. You need something to run the GIF.
Yes, that does it. I thought double clicking on the file itself would work.
Got it now, thanks.
I can see them with QuickLook in Finder, I’ll check if i use a plugin for that…
I also use a toolbar button in SU to start Licecap…
john
I think it must be a quicklook plugin. I don’t think there is any native animated gif viewer distributed with OS X.
Edit: I take it back. The image.qlgenerator handles animated gifs natively - at least in El Capitan.
I think mine uses this one qlImageSize
not AnimatedGIF_QL which broke around 10.8…
Installation
Download the .pkg installer here.
Open it.
Follow the steps. (you will be asked for an admin password)
john
Must learn how to do this.
Well, Box, with a little help from DaveR I was able to use LiceCap almost immediately. It really is a doddle.
I’ll give it a try but I’m sure it’s beyond me.
I just tested the GIPHY CAPTURE app for Macs. It’s fairly easy, and you can export as an mp4! If anyone has other Mac app recommendations for gifs or mp4-producing screen captures, I’d like to hear about it.
I’m also pretty excited to have apparently discovered the beginning of Box’s gif-making awesomeness in this old post.
I’m afraid not @Katya my comments in this thread was me attempting humor. I was making gifs long before I even joined this forum.
You’d have to search back through the threads at sketchucation to find my first gif.
I used the MacOS’s built in QuickTIme screen capture to do over 20 minutes of instructions with voice over for my students. It worked quite well, but just a few seconds of action, MOS, and just a portion of the screen was rejected by this forum as too big a file. I scratched my head and dropped it at the time. I’ll need to try LiceCap, I guess. What is the file limit on video, BTW?
3mb as for any other file.
Up until now, I’ve been using Quicktime Player to capture the video and trim bits off the start and end, then ffmpeg and convert (ImageMagick) to convert the Quicktime movie to a GIF, which has lots of settings if you want to tweak it. This also has the advantage that it is not captured in GIF, so could be edited in any video editing software that you might have.
@RTCool if you just can’t get the video size down small enough, put it on youtube (unlisted if you want) and post the link on the forum.
I’ve just tried LiceCap and it’s really nice for capturing the mouse cursor better than Quicktime player. It captures direct to GIF though, which I don’t have any way of editing easily but I could look into that. I usually at least have a bit needing trimmed off the beginning and end of the video even it I do it in one take. I tried Preview to delete a few frames, but when it saved the GIF, it recompressed it and it looked terrible. I suppose Photoshop would work for this.
If I just want a few frames animated, I would do it in Photoshop which also lets you place text or arrows to illustrate it.
