Urgent! Problem exporting files, help, please!

[Visualinotion]

Hello everyone, I need to send this work ASAP, I appreciate any help. 

I have my animation finnished and I need it as a gif. At first I tried downloadind ffmpeg and followed a video explanation, but for some reason the gif option never showed up, so I tried exporting as jpgs. Then an error appeared about files being missing and the export folder was completely empty. I tried other formats and I got an avi file, but when I try to play it, VLC showed me an error.
The error in spanish: Debido a que este índice está dañado o no se encuentra, la búsqueda no funcionará correctamente. VLC no reparará su archivo pero puede arreglar temporalmente este problema creando un índice para la memoria.
Translation:  Because this index is corrupted or missing, the search will not work correctly. VLC will not repair your file but you can temporarily fix this problem by creating an index to memory.
I chose "yes" and was able to play the file, but when I try converting that to a gif I get a weird result, my image is squished down. 

I tried reinstaling opentooonz, no changes. What can I do? Thank you. 

[DarrenT]

I think you've learned a valuable lesson. Prepare a draft early, to check your workflow.

But the reason that you can't see gif in the output options is either: You've not restarted after setting up ffmpeg or you haven't setup ffmpeg correctly.

Rendering to avi can sometimes produce  videos that don't play properly, but they're also much, much larger files, so you'd want to avoid those.

You should be able to render to jpeg though, so there's definitely an issue there. But GIF is your best bet, if you don't need any audio.

[Visualinotion]

It's pretty judgemental for you to say "you learned a valuable lesson" without knowing any details at all. I'm not a 15 yo kid learning to animate, I'm a professional who unexpectedly needed to change softwares in the middle of a project. I learned how to use Open Toonz and made the entire animation again in 1day and a half, so, no, I didn't have any time for any drafts. 
As I said, I can't export in jpeg, I don't know why. i will check again the process for ffmpeg, but I should be able to export in some other format, right? Any ideas? 

[DarrenT]

I apologise. I didn't assume your age or mean to be judgemental. But generating a test render, to make sure the program works for you should be something to do early in the process. What if it couldn't render on your system for some reason, but you didn't find out until the end. And you had to start again with a different software. That would be quite dire. So it's not about drafts, so much, as it is running it once, to check that everything's setup and works for you. So it sounded like a new person's mistake. Something that I do see a lot from younger or less experienced animators. As a professional, I'd hope you'd see this. It's a lesson that I keep re-learning by rushing with things.

Setting up ffmpeg is pretty straight forward once you've done it a couple of times, but is fiddly at first, so it might just be a case of setting the wrong path. If so, you might be on your way.

If not, then rendering to png would be better than jpeg. It gives you a transparent background, if that's what you need, and a clearer image. Then using a video editor to assemble those images into a gif.

[Visualinotion]

I'ts Ok, my apologies. It's just that working under pressure I'm bound to make mistakes like this and it's not something I can avoid conciously, but I agree I should have checked. 
For any reason, when I changed the path for the FFMPEG now it works. I only moved the files to another location. I also had to deactivate the antivirus though, it was interfeering somehow. I will try exporting in other formats with it off (I can't export in any format but gif for now). Thanks for your time. 

[DarrenT]

I'm glad you've got it working.

Anti-virus is something that can affect production. Usually when it's caused an issue, it's while drawing and creating the drawing files on disk, but rendering to a disk file could do the same, so that's a good thing to check.
Hopefully, that's all you need and you can finish your work off.

All the best,

Darren