What's your preferred AVI-to-aniGIF program?

[Chainmax]

While on the process of improving an old backup I made of my "Grave of the Fireflies" DVD, I came across a scene where Seita chases Setsuko across the beach. There's a ~3s portion in there that would be great to make into an animated GIF.
I've tried Jasc Animation Shop 3 before, and while ok, it never produced results anywhere near the dither-free, crystal clear ones I see around the net all the time. So, which program do you prefer for such conversions?

[Tri]

I always use GIF Movie Gear.

[Chainmax]

Sounds good, I'll try it and report back. Thanks :).


[edit]It's quite better than Jasc, but still not quite up to what I've seen:

http://xs216.xs.to/xs216/07220/GotF.gif (http://xs.to)
(Notice the dithering in the sky)

[Dark Shikari]

Ulead GIF Animator is the best. Choose "minimum variance" instead of "median cut" on the palette for best results.

Also lowering dithering can sometimes help.

[mgh]

In animation shop while saving, set quality slider to max in the quality dialog box that opens, click customize, select octree and error diffusion.

[Chainmax]

Dark Shikari: I'll give the trial version a whirl and report back, thanks for the advice :).

mgh: IIRC, I tried that and the only difference I noticed was an increase in filesize.

[Dark Shikari]

Dark Shikari: I'll give the trial version a whirl and report back, thanks for the advice :).

mgh: IIRC, I tried that and the only difference I noticed was an increase in filesize.
I've used Ulead GIF Animator for some absolutely insane animated GIFs. A few notes if you are as stupidly insane as I am:

a) It loads all the images into memory uncompressed at once. This means that if you're planning on creating an animated GIF that would be multiple gigabytes decompressed, you may have trouble.

b) Calculating an optimized palette for thousands of frames can take... a while.

To give you an idea of something somewhat insane that I created with Ulead, see this (http://content.ytmnd.com/content/9/d/6/9d6f62697a5f00349eb77911f3327901.gif), an ASCII-art music video converted into an animated GIF (obviously missing the music). Its roughly 3-4 minutes long, and took an ungodly amount of memory to create. The fact that Ulead could even do it at all though shows that it is pretty capable, IMO.

Also note that apparently in Internet Explorer it seems to max out your CPU towards the end. I don't know why, but use Firefox or Opera, seriously.

[Chainmax]

That was badass, Dark Shikari, thanks for sharing http://smilies.vidahost.com/otn/wink/thumb.gif.

Also, thanks for the "minimum variance" tip, now the dithering is almost imperceptible:

http://xs216.xs.to/xs216/07235/GotF.gif (http://xs.to)

:)