How to Mass Produce Animated GIFs Like a GOD, Made Easy!

This tutorial will help you become an ultimate 🗿🗿ANIMATED GIF GOD🗿🗿.

GIFs are animated images that autoplay, have no sound, have the biggest support on the web and are the most powerful eye-catching media that you can use to promote your games, showcase content updates and show people how to do something cool ingame.

Want to see examples of tons of animated GIFs and be inspired? Then visit https://giphy.com/ its a giant gallery of GIFs - you can upload your completed gifs there too!

Here’s a quick step-by-step process to record gifs in 2024:

STEP 1 - ShareX to capture video clips

• Use ShareX to capture .mp4 video footage. 10 seconds or less. Record as many clips as you want, let them pile up in your chosen folder. Obviously you need to download, install and run ShareX too.

(When you first install and open ShareX, it may look confusing, but the above 5 Steps give you a quick start to get to using it as fast as possible. The most important parts are setting up a hotkey, setting up the settings for this hotkey (go through each category to see if there’s something that matters to you, enable the “Override General Settings” tab to access grayed out settings) and setting up the save folder and filename for your clips.)

STEP 2 - Shutter Encoder to crop those video clips

• Then use Shutter Encoder to trim, crop, and resize the videos individually or en masse. Aim for a resolution below 640x480. Smaller the better. If you didn’t notice yet, Shutter Encoder is a separate program. It's not part of ShareX.

(Cropping and trimming is most important, both will reduce filesize massively. You can also try to record your video clips in a smart way so that you don’t need to trim them and potentially crop them all in bulk by cutting off 40 pixels margins from all borders/sides, instead of cropping them one-by-one. There’s a quality tradeoff when you do things in bulk like this, so be mindful of that if you’re ok with it.)

STEP 3 - Shutter Encoder again to convert video to GIFs

• Finally, use Shutter Encoder again to convert the .mp4 files into GIF format by selecting the Function -> Image -> .gif format option.

(Shutter Encoder works by doing one big job at a time. You cannot do some operations in GIF convert mode that you can access in H264 mode. You also lose video quality more dramatically when converting video to gif, so doing cropping/trimming/image effects is best done BEFORE you convert your videos to GIFs.)

By following these steps, you can efficiently mass produce multiple GIFs for all your needs.

STEP 4 - Easy Bulk GIF Optimizer to reduce filesize of GIFs

(Refer to the manual of Easy Bulk GIF Optimizer to see how to use it; all you have to do is throw your converted gifs into one folder, run the .bat file, choose compression quality setting, and then find your optimized gifs in another folder. Easy and fast!)

After converting the videos to gifs you’ll notice they’re rather heavy, something over 10 MB in size which is bad if you want your gifs to load faster for people, save their bandwidth, or cater to people with slow internet connections. To fix that, just use my tool: https://reactorcore.itch.io/easy-bulk-gif-optimizer-automatic-batch-compressor

You can decrease the file size by over 50% with some degree of quality loss. Some places online like itch.io have hard limits, requiring the gifs to be 3 MB or smaller, but generally you’ll be ok with having your gifs to around 5 MB or less.

Links: 

ShareX - https://getsharex.com/ 

Shutter Encoder - https://www.shutterencoder.com/

Easy Bulk Gif Optimizer - https://reactorcore.itch.io/easy-bulk-gif-optimizer-automatic-batch-compressor

Both tools are free, so anyone with a Windows 7 machine or newer should be able to get started with making gifs like its candy. Both programs may need a day or two to learn, but they're easier than they might seem at first glance.

Now go on and become the ultimate 🗿🗿GIF GOD🗿🗿 you were meant to be! 😎👍