Any recommendations for a good program for making GIFs from video files? Something that's easy to use and gives you good quality GIFs.

Xilisoft,

gifsoup (youtube videos)

Gom Media player does it actually, thats a good one.

I like JASC Animation Shop.

Okay. I downloaded that. How do you make GIFs? I need step by step directions.

+1. It's pretty intuitive, and once you have the basics down it's a piece of cake.

I use a combination of tools to create .GIFs, but it all gets passed into JASC Animation Shop 3 to create the final result.

Same here.

What I used to do was cut the video up the way I wanted in TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress and then I would make the final touches in Ulead GIF Animator 5. But then my computer crashed and I was screwed. I lost everything.

Anyways, I downloaded that JASC Animation Shop 3 and I want to try it out. Can someone provide some step by step directions on making a GIF from a video file with that?

Personally, I use avidemux2 to save the frames I want. Then I use Adobe PS to automate levels, resizing, and cropping if necessary, and toss them into JASC. That's mostly for making avys, it is a process.
If they don't need to be cropped or touched up, you can just put them right into JASC, it can change the size for you.
First step...download avidemux, or whatever you want to use to get your frames.