Since there may be people in the know ... Is ffmpeg an appropriate tool to make gifs? Or are there more appropriate tools? (to designate static regions in a scene for instance )
Yes, I wrote a blog post about it, though the post is quite old now and maybe there are other better ways [0].
In short, ffmpeg can be used directly to create a gif:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 large_output.gif
but it can be quite large. You can also use the appropriate "start" and "duration" options to selectively get a portion out.
Animated gifs are pretty inefficient as it is so I'm usually happy with the above, and make sure to only restrict to 5-10s max, but there are other programs to try and help reduce the size, like gifsicle [1] and imagemagick [2].
It's an effective first stage... and with enough wizardry you can optimize it a fair bit too.
Personally I crop, resize, time-slice, and dump to gif with no other arguments... and then just use gifsicle. Gifsicle is absolutely amazing, both significantly better results and significantly easier.
ScreenToGif has a very nice editor that can make cinemagraphs, remove duplicate frames, etc.
ffmpeg can make gifs, but I don't know how you would do stuff like static regions. It could probably be done with some masking and filtering, but I think you would need to make the mask separately so why not use a GUI gif editor instead?
There are better tools, not that I know them. The most ffmpeg can do is generate a palette and use it to make 256 color video which is then fed into the gif encoder.
