Occasionally, I do screen captures.  I use the Microsoft Expression Encoder.  It’s not pretty, but I think it’s free.  The output, by default, is a WMV (Windows Media Video) file.

YouTube is perfectly okay with WMV files.  However, for an animation to show up in Twitter, it has to be an animated GIF with a limit of 5 MB.

Enter ImageMagick:

convert -resize 50% -deconstruct -layers optimize inputFile.wmv outputFile.gif

This took a 14-20 MB animated GIF (uncompressed) to 1.36 MB.  Which is nice, because then I can show gems like this:

https://twitter.com/okiAndrew/status/763819198875402244

Cheers!