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 ot

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.