Ask IH: Best tool to record gifs for product documentation
Hey Hackers,
I'm currently updating our user guides and have found that gifs are a great way of explaining features.
At the moment I'm using Giphy Capture however it's been super buggy and not user-friendly at all. Happy to use a free or paid tool.
Thanks!
this one is free, cross platform and works great
https://www.cockos.com/licecap/
came here to say this. it's ugly as sin and has a horrible name but it works flawlessly, every time.
LMAO. +1
haha awesome. Any recommendations on tools to edit gifs after you've captured them?
Not sure I've never tried!
+1 for this tool. I installed it on my work computer many years ago (somehow it evaded IT and I didn't need admin privileges). I refuse to move it or let it go as I worry it will get blocked.
Have used it in the past to record small product demos for the website. It works great.
James - please write a follow-up response after you tried a couple of suggestions with your verdict. :)
Nice suggestion - will do.
What was the verdict? If you have a sec, could you share your thoughts or post a link please? Considering Lice Cap now.
recordit.co – the best one as for me, and 100% free.
Does this have a way of downloading the completed gifs for does it default to hosting them for you?
Yes, it defaults to hosting them. You can password protect it, but this is paid feature. And you can save gifs as well.
Not promoting it, just using this tool for a few years
I ditched all my previous recorders for Sharex, free and open source!
https://getsharex.com
Has all the screen capture features you will ever need..probably.
Can record to Vid or Gif
@jamesfmac
Just wanted to chime in here since your use case is user guides.
Lately my team has been using useloom.com to communicate every single feature to each other.
It takes 2 seconds to start recording a video and 2 seconds to generate it and send to everyone.
And best of all, it has screencap PLUS video, so you get this really nice, personal feel when you're talking into it.
The use case is slightly different, but IMO it's easier to sell/explain something when you add that voice component. Might be worth considering as an alternative!
Thanks Jeff. Looks super interesting when doing 1 on 1 support for new features. May not work for producing content that can be embeded into product guides.
Very much agree that a 2 second video can be worth more than 1,000 words and a handful of screenshots.
https://gifox.io/
I've enjoyed using Gifox as well. Their team responds quickly to feedback and questions.
Thanks MarK. Will give it a try.
My setup is complicated but 100% free
Screen capture: OBS as well. It’s quite confusing to learn, and it’s designed for real-time streaming first, so encoding is optimized for speed, not quality (you’ll see lots of artifacts when the content changes rapidly, e.g. scrolls)
Editing: DaVinci Resolve, a Premiere+AfterEffects alternative that is FREE!
If I specifically need a gif and not mp4, I use ezgif.com to convert. It has limited dimension settings and FPS for video-to-gif, but if I ever need HD gifs, there's a hack: one can export the video as separate frames and use ezgif's frames-to-gif feature — it doesn’t have those limits, only the total file size limit.
Thanks Paul. Might be a bit too much for what I need at this stage. The editing tool looks interesting though, I hadn't really considered how I would edit them.
As for paid tools, I once tried Camtasia. If you’re looking for user-friendly, give it a try.
I've been using https://www.screentogif.com successfully for some time now. Free, Open-source but Windows only
I have to comment on this just to save this page for later referrance. How i wish IH had a way to save upvote discussions.
I love VClip (http://blog.bahraniapps.com/vclip/)
.. and it supports saving to H.264 MP4s (better quality, smaller file sizes, well supported in browsers).
This dev also created GifCam (http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/) which is great if you want to work just with GIFs.
Both are free, supported via donations.
As a Linux user, I found Peek (https://github.com/phw/peek) as a great GIF recorder. Simple, easy to use and makes for great screenshots.
(Here is a quick example of what I did to demo my side project: https://dorianpula.ca/2017/12/08/rookeries-v0-9-0-out-new-ui-and-live-editing-of-sites-juggling-jq-with-json-book-update/ with Peek)
https://www.getcloudapp.com/
free tier allows for 15sec gifs
I use the new built-in screen capture tool in macOS Mojave
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721
and then convert the resulting video to gif using:
http://gifbrewery.com/
I installed a Chrome extension recently to take full page screenshots, Nimbus, and it has a capture tab (or screen) option.
Just tried it and... probably not great. It played back ok, but after saving the resulting video, vlc showed some weird corruption/artifacts.
Might just be a Linux or VLC issue, not sure. It also has a save as gif option, but you have to upgrade to pro for that.
For screenshots (ie not video) try Fireshot chrome ext (no gif making option).
For recording I use screencastify chrome ext (also no gif making option).
An overly complicated yet nearly bug free way is to record using OBS (https://obsproject.com/ [Free]) and then edit and output via Adobe Premiere (https://www.rocketstock.com/blog/how-to-export-gif-from-premiere-pro/ [Premiere cost $$]). But it's not very user friendly.