How to Create a Screen Recording with Quicktime

Creating screen recordings is an essential skill for web developers. Screen recordings can illustrate new features, bugs, or a variety of other ideas. I’m often asked what app I use to create screen recordings and people are shocked when I tell them Quicktime! Let’s review how to create a screen recording with with Mac’s native Quicktime! In Short: Open Quicktime Choose File -New Screen Recording Record your screen actions Press COMMAND+CONTROL+ESC to stop and save Step 1: Open Quicktime To get started with the process of recording your screen, open the Quicktime app. The Quicktime app will immediately open a dialog to import or play a video — close that dialog as... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

How to Create a Diff of Two Images

When I was a child, I loved looking for Waldo in the “Where’s Waldo?” book series. These days I’m a sucker for TMZ’s “What’s the Big Frigin Difference” images, where TMZ slightly changes an image and you have to spot the differences between the two. That got me to thinking — how easily could I automate diff’ing two images? This StackOverflow post was gold. To create a diff of two similar images, we’ll use ImageMagick’s convert command line utility with a large host of configurations: convert '(' image1.png -flatten -grayscale Rec709Luminance ')' '(' image2.png -flatten -grayscale Rec709Luminance ')' ... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Create a Thumbnail From a Video with ffmpeg

Creating a thumbnail to represent a video is a frequent task when presenting media on a website. I previously created a shell script to create a preview video from a larger video, much like many adult sites provide. Let’s view how we can create a preview thumbnail from a video! Developers can use `ffmpeg, an incredible open source media utility, to create a thumbnail. To create a thumbnail from the first frame of a video, execute the following command: ffmpeg -i input.webm -vf "select=eq(n\,34)" -vframes 1 thumbnail.png Providing a video thumbnail is a great tool convert images into video views. You don’t need fancy software and manual labor to create thumbnails — use... more →
Posted in: JavaScript
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