Turn Apple QuickTime MOV recordings into animated GIFs. Includes what to do when an iPhone HEVC or ProRes file will not preview.
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MOV is Apple's default container. Every iPhone screen recording, QuickTime capture, and Final Cut export lands as a .mov file. That is fine inside the Apple ecosystem, but a GIF is what actually renders inline in a GitHub issue, a Jira ticket, a Slack thread, or an email body without asking the recipient to download and open anything. Converting is less about format support and more about getting an animation that plays where you are pasting it.
A .mov file is a wrapper. What matters is the codec inside it, and MOV can hold several very different ones. H.264 is the most common and the most portable. HEVC (H.265) is what an iPhone produces when "High Efficiency" is enabled in Camera settings. ProRes comes out of Final Cut and professional capture cards. All three decode correctly on our server, because the conversion runs FFmpeg server-side rather than in your browser. We tested each one through the same upload path you use. The reason this distinction matters is explained in the next section: the server is not the step that usually fails.
Before anything is uploaded, the editor loads your file into an HTML5 video element so you can scrub the timeline, set trim points, crop, and paint a mosaic mask. That preview step uses your browser's decoder, not ours, and browser codec support is far narrower than FFmpeg's. H.264 in MOV previews everywhere. HEVC is more complicated: it reaches roughly 92% of browsers by usage share, but only about 17% have full support, with the rest depending on an OS-level or hardware decoder being present. In practice HEVC previews reliably in Safari on Apple hardware and is inconsistent elsewhere. ProRes does not preview in any browser. If the editor shows a load error, the file is not corrupt and the codec is not unsupported by the converter — the browser simply could not decode it for preview, so it never reached the server.
You have two straightforward options. Open the page in Safari on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, which handles HEVC natively and is the fastest fix for iPhone footage. Or re-wrap the file to H.264 before uploading: on iPhone, set Camera settings to "Most Compatible" so future recordings save as H.264; on a Mac, exporting from QuickTime Player or Photos produces an H.264 MP4 that previews anywhere. For ProRes specifically, export a smaller H.264 version from Final Cut first — a ProRes file is often ten times larger than the H.264 equivalent, so this also saves a long upload.
iPhone screen recordings are typically 1080p or higher at 30 or 60 fps, which makes them the largest common source for GIFs. Two adjustments matter more than the quality slider. Crop to the region you are demonstrating rather than the whole screen, because removing half the frame removes half the pixels from every frame. Then drop the frame rate: UI interactions read perfectly well at 10 to 15 fps, and frame rate is roughly linear in file size. How much you actually save depends on how much motion and colour variation the clip contains, so check the byte size shown after conversion against your target platform instead of assuming a fixed percentage.
The four presets set frame rate, palette size, and output dimensions together. Smallest File runs at 5 fps with 64 colours and suits near-static content only. Smaller File at 10 fps and 128 colours is the practical default for chat and social. Higher Quality at 24 fps with a full 256-colour palette is the right choice when someone needs to read text or follow a cursor, which covers most screen recordings. Best Quality runs at 30 fps and builds its palette in a separate pass across every frame in the clip rather than sampling while encoding, which is worth the larger file for gradients and skin tones. At Best Quality, a source of 720p or below keeps its native resolution untouched.
Yes. Open this page on your iPhone, tap the upload area, and pick a video from your camera roll. Safari on iOS decodes HEVC natively, so the preview works even for High Efficiency recordings. The conversion itself runs on our server, so your phone is only handling the upload.
Yes. Our server-side FFmpeg handles HEVC in both 8-bit and 10-bit form, as well as ProRes and H.264. We verified each through the live upload path. The limitation is not conversion but preview: the editor needs your browser to decode the file first so you can trim and crop. If the preview fails, use Safari on Apple hardware or export an H.264 copy.
Almost certainly a different codec inside the same .mov extension. ProRes cannot be decoded by any browser, so the editor cannot build a preview, while an H.264 MOV previews everywhere. Extension alone does not tell you whether a file will load — the codec inside does.
MOV files from iPhones, Macs, and editing software use high bitrates for quality. ProRes in particular is designed for editing rather than distribution and is often ten times the size of an H.264 export. Trim to the segment you need and crop away unused pixels before converting. Uploading is usually the slowest part of the whole process, so a shorter clip helps twice.
No, and the reason is structural rather than a setting you can change. GIF is limited to a 256-colour palette per frame while your source may contain millions of colours, so conversion has to choose which colours survive and simulate the rest through dithering. Best Quality uses the full 256-colour palette with a separate palette-generation pass, which gets closest to the source; the other three presets build the palette while encoding.
Uploads and downloads run over HTTPS. The server writes your file to temporary storage because FFmpeg reads from disk, deletes it after the GIF is returned, and clears any leftovers within 10 minutes. See the Privacy Policy for the full lifecycle and the inherent limits of server-side processing.