First Steps

The story why I wanted to create a GIF is not that long... I often thought about creating a GIF but the final trigger has been a Version information about new Visual Studio Code features. I started doing research for ways to create a GIF an firstly ended up with Captura for Screen capturing. It also provide different mode to capture a mp4, Avi or directly a GIF format. But the quality of the direct GIF capturing did not fulfill my expectations.

Like in this example:

Using another caputure method and converting the file

So I tried capturing as mp4 and Avi format and than converting it to a GIF format using command line tools like ffmpeg, ImageMagick and some others which it is not worth mentioning. There I ended up with a partly better quality but the file size was much more than expected. For 20 Seconds the file size was around 10 MB to 15 MB. Some tool event ended around 50 MB. I had expected a file of about 3 MB to 5 MB. So I wasn´t happy with this Solution either.

As example for the quality I show you this shortened one.

The way to go for me

My way to create a good GIF in both a good quality and small file size has not finished yet. I searched for another solution that could hopefully offer what I wanted. On the platform GitHub I found a tool called "ScreenToGif", a project existing with its first commit on Oct 12, 2013 for some years now. Having more than 300 Commits and 20 Contributors. A Tool that no longer is in the beginning and offering a bunch of features now. I tried it and was pleaseantly surprised. The Quality has been way better than my earlier tries and the file size was all right too.

Here is the final GIF: