Animated SVG have tiny file sizes, are crisp at any zoom level, can be great for accessibility, and run at 60 frames-per-second. But they can't be embedded in most social media and they won't play in old versions of Internet Explorer. So sometimes you need a crummy old GIF instead.
Make a high-quality recording of your edited animation (lossless if possible). On Linux, I use SimpleScreenRecorder to record a fixed rectangle (the dimensions of the SVG) in a full-screened browser window, recording at 30 frames per second, using H264 codec in an MP4 container.
You could also use FFMPEG to record the screen. On a Mac, you can use Quicktime Player to record the screen.
I use the incredible command line tool FFMPEG to convert high-resolution, full-color, 30fps, efficiently-compressed MP4 videos into bloated, crappy GIFs that are half the resolution & framerate, only have 256 colors, and are twice the filesize. I weep softly to myself as I do it.
First, generate a 256-color palette (palette.png) from your source video:
ffmpeg -i data-on-a-pātaka.mp4 \
-filter_complex "[0:v] palettegen" \
palette.png
Then, using the source video and your new palette as inputs, convert the video to a GIF.
ffmpeg -i data-on-a-pātaka.mp4 \
-filter_complex "[0:v] fps=15,scale=1000:-1,split [a][b];[a] palettegen [p];[b][p] paletteuse" \
data-on-a-pātaka.gif
scale=1000:-1
means 'make it 1000px wide, and scale the height according to the original aspect ratio'. Change this (or the fps=15
framerate setting) if you like, but keep an eye on the resulting filesize of your GIF. GIF has a very old compression algorithm (from 1984! 🤯) and it makes gigantic files by modern standards.