Creating my own reaction GIFs (with ffmpeg)

Published January 28, 2024 by Tommy George

Just keeping a note here. Will update this post later.

I’ve been creating a fun set of my own “reaction GIFs”, just for fun. The first drafts seemed pretty popular so far, and caught people off guard. 😆

More on the process later.

Once I had sliced up a video into a series of reactions, and named them each, I had a folder of files like:

• oh-my.mp4
• shocked.mp4
• eeeeee.mp4
• yeeeeahh.mp4
• woot.mp4

And this is the command that is working for me so far:

for file in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i $file -vf "scale=-1:300:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease" -r 15 ${file%.*}.gif; done

The bare command, without the loop:

ffmpeg -i example.mp4 -vf "scale=-1:300:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease" -r 15 example.gif

Couple details:

• This maintains the nearly-square aspect ratio that I exported, but making sure the output is 300px high or less.
• -r 15 sets the frame-rate down to 15fps. For a gif, this saves a massive amount of file-size. I saw no reason to keep all 25 or more fps from the original, 720p video recording.