It would be okay if the cropping process wouldn't mess up GIFs!
For a gif to not be messed up, you have to make sure that you crop starting from the top-left corner.
If you DON'T start from the top-left corner, your GIF avy will be glitchy, like this one, which you can compare to my current avi:
Basically, it incompletely crops the picture; it crops every frame but the very first one, but retains the size that you wanted to crop it to.
I don't know how the process used to be, though.