Alex Le’s Blog

I’d like to republish my answer to a question on Sitepoint.com’s forum at http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=404876 about taking GIF animated screencast instead of outputting as the commonly used Flash. The GIF files have been scaled to fit to normal resolution (its original size is a whopping +900px!) so the image is quite grainy and doesn’t look as good. Click on them for a better view.

I’ve been using Camtasia for a while to produce flash videos and always know that Camtasia can do more than just outputting to Flash. After reading your question, I played with Techsmith Camtasia (I’m using 3.1.1) and found the Export to GIF option in the “Produce Video As” dialog. The rest is just playing with the settings to get to the right color option and file size. The output size is pretty good: I orignially recorded a 50sec long clip of 900 x 464, using the default settings, the file size output is 340Kb! Just a little bit bigger than the 256Kb upload limit of SitePoint. The produced color is slightly off because there is a wide spectrum of color in the screencast.

I chopped the clip down to about 16 secs and the fiesize is 124KB. And here is an attachment of the screencast in GIF. I used [url]http://www.stripedesigner.com[/url] as the test sample because there are small details (the stripes and small patterns) and some animations to see how good the output compression is.

Here is another sample of the clip with Dither On, 256 Color with Fixed palete. The size is a whopping 470Kb but notice how there are more colors. The stripes are quite grainy but it’s understandable because of the dithering and limited color palete. The clip is also a bit longer, close to the orignial 50 sec screen recording.

The result is quite satisfactory, however, I wouldn’t advice to use GIF output for movie or screencast of high color bitrates as we all know that GIF only support 256 colors. I wonder what would happen if we have PNG24-animation (with alpha-channel fullyloaded) ??

So what is my take on this? Probably producing Flash video is a good choice for long, graphics-heavy screencasts as the output SWF will have much better interaction (thanks to the navigational control bar) and higher quality (no pallete-color restriction). But for short clips of screencast, I’d say animated GIF if perfect for the job. Why? GIF is a lot more portable than Flash. Secondly, GIF can be used on mobile phones if you need it to while FlashLite player hasn’t done too well in the mobile phone sector. Thirdly, some people hate Flash and they get FlashBlock to block Flash clips. I do this all the time when go reading news. Newssite now have tons of annoying flash ads that I’m more than to be happy to get rid of them by switching FlashBlock to ON. This leaves animated GIF to be a universal solution to solve the screencast question.

By the way, go for Techsmite Camtasion if you want to do serious screencasts — it’s a much superior application than any other similar products out there!