You can also set the looping options in this window to play ‘Once’, ‘Forever’ or a specified number of times. Try reducing the number of colours to bring the file size down. More specifically, you can save your selection as a Gif file which is the most common format or as an LCF file, which allows a higher compression ratio (over 256 colors per frame). The window below is displayed, allowing you to alter the settings to get the right balance between file size and quality. LICEcap is a small application that will help us capture a specific area on our computer screen and save it as an animation (Gif). When saving your final animation, go to ‘File’, ‘Export’ and ‘Save for Web’. If you’re going to loop your animation it’s good idea to have a pause on the last frame of 1-2 seconds – so set this individually. To do this select all frames, click on the time at the bottom, select a predefined time from the list or ‘Other’ to enter your own. We changed this to ‘No delay’ for a smoother animation. You can also change the delay time of each frame to suit your animation. To do this, open the GIF and using the timeline window delete any redundant frames by selecting the frame and clicking on the bin icon. The outputted GIF from LICEcap can be edited in Adobe Photoshop to remove any unwanted screens and refine the animation. Simply hit ‘Stop’ when you’re finished and the GIF will be saved in your selected location. We set the MAX FPS to 24, which is a standard rate for animation. Once installed, all you need to do is resize the recording window to fit the content you wish to capture, set the maximum frames per second (MAX FPS) and hit ‘Record’. Stripping back the colours in your photography can result in a ‘grungy’ look, which can be very effective as the example below shows: However, it doesn’t mean you should rule out using photos completely. If you create a GIF from a detailed photograph you are likely to notice a reduction in quality. As a result, they work best with images that contain simple shapes and a limited colour palette, as the example below shows: GIF files can only contain a maximum of 256 colours. When to use GIFs?īefore you begin, you should assess whether your content is suitable for this purpose. We found this to be really useful in allowing us to quickly create animated GIFS which we’ve used to demo content on our website and in presentations.
Licecap blocky animation software#
LICEcap is a free piece of software that allows you to record your screen, with the option to output as a GIF file. Following on from our blog on ‘Making animated GIFs in Adobe After Effects’ we recently found another handy tool to aid GIF creation, this time for screen capture.
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