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How To Record Video-cast GIF Animations

I'm playing with some game dev fun on the side, and as part of motivating myself I hope to have something to post to /r/GameDev's Screenshot Saturday event every weekend. This quickly got me wanting to show off something other than a still image, so I went looking for how people produce the animated screenshot GIFs I see developers posting of their games all over. Here's what I found:

Step 1: CamStudio

This open source screencast recorder is very simple, very light, free, and does a good job of recording a basic AVI screencast of a portion of your screen. You can set it to record just the part of your screen where your game is running, so you don't need to worry with post-processing crop. I tried a few other tools before this, and all of them had more up-front configuration and none of them really worked well. Either they only recorded black, or they had awful framerates, or they made my whole system crawl.

Just get CamStudio.

Step 2: VirtualDub

Maybe there is another more straight forward tool, but the first I tried (OpenAviToGif) just crashed after the first frame. VirtualDub seems to be for some other features that, frankly, I didn't even pay attention to. But, it has a simple export feature that can convert your CamStudio recorded AVI into a GIF very easily.

Download VirtualDub from their Sourceforge page.

Step 3: Post to /r/GameDev

Just do it, every Saturday. Tons of fun!

and as an extra, here's my first:


Anonymous said…
Hi Calvin!
I'm the developer of openAviToGif. The situation is a bit funny considering that I have trouble using CamStudio - it either doesn't record anything or crashes:)
Can you please send me ( the video that causes openAviToGif to crash so I can investigate it?
Also, which version of the app do you use?


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