Classifying animated GIFs as animation or film Is there any known way of differentiating between frames of real footage and animated content?  It seems like there's probably range of colors more likely to appear in a histogram for real footage, or maybe a level of color variation more likely to be in animation.

The case I'm looking at is converting GIF images to h264, so there's a max of 256 colors to work with.  I'm mostly trying to figure out when I should use the animation profile so the output is screwed up as little as possible in the transcode.
It's a studied problem. Here are some relevant papers:


Detecting cartoons: a case study in automatic video-genre classification 
A color-action perceptual approach to the classification of animated movies
Detecting Cartoons: Automatic Video Genre Classification