One Tip a Week: ffmpeg + AI = Easy GIFs

This week’s tip is a combo: ffmpeg, but with a little help from AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude.

I’d never touched ffmpeg before, but I asked ChatGPT: “I have an mp4 video. How can I convert part of it to an animated gif?”. It instantly gave me a working command:

ffmpeg -ss 00:00:10 -t 5 -i input.mp4 \
  -vf "fps=15,scale=480:-1:flags=lanczos" output.gif

That wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but after a couple more prompts, I came up with this:

ffmpeg -ss 00:00:26 -t 12 -i input.mp4 \
  -vf "fps=30,split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen=max_colors=256[p];[s1][p]paletteuse=dither=bayer:bayer_scale=5:diff_mode=rectangle" output.gif

And just like that I had a 12 seconds clean, high‑quality animated GIF in a couple minutes. No fancy video editor, just a single open‑source tool + AI guidance. Sometimes you don’t need to know the tool, just how to ask the right question.

For the curious, here’s the original video. Next time you need something done to a video, see what ChatGPT/Claude offers as a command suggestion via ffmpeg, and let me know on socials!

That’s it! Short and sweet. Until the next one!