How to use Gource to show your project's timeline

The first time I heard about Gource was in 2013. At the time I watched this cool video showing Ruby on Rails source code evolution:

At Thinkific, we have (almost) monthly Product Town Halls, which we use to communicate product decisions and keep all product teams (Designers, Engineers, Product Managers and QAs) on the same page.

We like to start the keynote with some gource video of our projects. Here is how we are doing:

gource --hide dirnames,filenames --seconds-per-day 0.1 --auto-skip-seconds 1 -1280x720 -o - | ffmpeg -y -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 1 -threads 0 -bf 0 gource.mp4

The README of Gource has all the options you can customize in your video. Tied to ffmpeg, we create a mp4 file that can be used inside Google Slides or YouTube. Here's the output of the example above:

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By the way - Thinkific is hiring for several positions if you are interested.