Wow big informative thread here cool. I'm kinda half assed making avatars as well. It's kinda fun so i might want to learn to use less crude methods.
So far my methods consist of pressing ctrl or shift +s in vlc making screenshots
Than i put the into the animation wizzard of jasc animation shop.
<------ my best work
I crop the scene i want. I figure out a timing that doesn't feel very off. Every screen gets a timing of around 10/15ms.
And finally resize.
Biggest problem in this thing is the screenshotting with vlc isn't a very good fixed capture rate and also the half assed timing in animation shop with guessing how many ms per frame isn't the the best solution for making a fluid gif.
How many frames per second does a fluid gif has?