Loftwings and Demons

So I've discovered a process I like for producing animated gifs which uses software that is all free and that I feel is fairly straightforward to use, so I thought I'd outline it here.

1. Use VLC to batch capture the frames for the gif from the source video.

2. (optional) Use darktable to make edits to the frames like changing color balance or levels or brightness, etc.  Basically, make any kind of photo edits you want here.  This program can batch process frames, so if you make a bunch of edits on one frame, you can copy and paste those same edits to all the rest of your frames simultaneously (or to any subset of those frames you want to apply the changes to).

3. Use Krita to turn the frames into a gif.  Since it's an art program, you can also add some artistic additions to your gif using this program if you want.

And that's it!  Krita doesn't have a lot of options for saving the gif at this time, but the defaults seem to work pretty well.  Perhaps in the future more functionality for that will be added as the animation feature is still fairly new.