GifCam is easy and fun animated gif making app.

GifCam has a nice idea where the app works like a camera that stays on top of all windows so you can move it and resize it to record your desired area.

When you’re ready, click “Rec” to start recording or  click “Frame” to record a single frame.

GifCam is practical

While recording whenever GifCam finds the previous frame is same as the new recorded one it automatically adds delays (milliseconds the frame stays on screen) instead of adding a new frame and increasing gif size.

Add to this GifCam doesn’t draw the whole frame it draws greenscreen (transparent pixels) by comparing the alternately frames and just draw the different pixels, that saves a lot of kilobytes.

Editing

GifCam comes with simple and powerful frames editing,
To delete frames/add or remove delays, click on “Edit” button then right click on the frame you want to edit :

Saving

When you done recording and editing,
you can save your gif in 5 color reduction formats.

*Windows XP doesn’t support “split button” natively so right click on the save button to get the save menu.

GifCam can be used in many creative ways like:

creating an animated painting using  MS Paint (264 frames just 17.4 KB !!)

or delivering an animated message in notepad  (123 frames just 13.4 KB !!)

or creating a retro gif (monochrome color redaction) from YouTube video (41 frames 219 KB)

• Add text : with Add text you can write some text in one line or more, set the frames range, position the text , align it left/center/right , add shadow and change the font with the native Windows font dialog.

• Two more Frame rate options for more smooth gif:
  • 10 FPS(0.1 second delay) the default.
  • 16 FPS(0.06  second delay) minimum accepted delay in all major browsers.
  • 33 FPS(0.03 second delay) minimum accepted delay in modern browsers, notice that some browsers doesn’t accept 0.03 delay between frames and round it to 10 FPS(0.1 second delay).
• Open: open a gif file as you are the one who record it, so you can continue record , edit the frames and the delays, or save it to other color redaction format.
• A new way to adjust frames delay: By dragging the delay label (each pixel = 0.01 second)
  Shift + dragging will add/remove delays to/from all frames (0.03 second is the minimum delay).

• Disable GreenScreen: Shift + Save Button(or any save redaction option).
• Capture cursor:  useful for demonstrating the mouse interaction.

• Nearest: Nearest Uses the (nearest color matching algorithm) which produce a less size gif (this depends on how nearest the colors are).
• Full Screen: GifCam ignore recording area and capture the Full Screen.
• Recording different frames dimensions (resize while recording).
• One Gigabyte Memory usage limit: to prevent slowing down the system.
• Getting the recording area dimensions while resizing the app.
• Other bugs fixes and tweaks.

Version 3.0 comes with five Sweet features and some minor fixes:

• Resize: anti-aliasing resize frames by percentage.

• Yoyo: adds reverse frames.

• Draw Green Screen: with this feature  you can create part moving part still gif “cinemagraph” (press shift to draw on one frame).

• Preview: preview with size.

• Export To AVI: export your record to uncompressed video.

• One bug fixed: Yoyo feature adds 0 ms delay to all yoyo frames instead of adding yoyo delays.

• Custom color reduction: snapping color to nearest number.

• GreenScreen Paint fill: paint greenscreen outside or inside a closed shape by pressing Ctrl+Click (to paint on one frame press Shift+Ctrl+Click ).

• Mouse wheel support: you can use mouse wheel to scroll in Edit window, it is a little feature but it makes a lot of difference 🙂

Tips

Here are some tips for using GifCam:

• When recording a video select high quality option that will generate a wider green screen area than a low quality and reduce gif size.
• The less color the gif has the less  gif size you get try to balance the quality with the size.
•  ”Delete even frames” is your tool to delete half the frames and keep the animation (reasonable).

Feel free to comment ,  criticize,  and support the app.

Download Link