ffmpeg is a really powerful tool that's well worth learning. It's become my go to for almost every video, audio, and still image task.
One thing that might help: ffmpeg is, in fact, the Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well", it just so happens that all the commands are prefixed by the ffmpeg command, but you can break things down really easily after that. Each codec is independent, mappings are independent, filters, etc.
Something I don't think many talk about, the fact that ffmpeg can input and output images, and does it really quick.
Recently I was working on processing large images (100-200MB per jpg) which needed a crop, some added text and "progress bar" for a timelapse. I started with imagemagick, it was super slow, so tried graphicsmagick, also slow, just somehow I thought, why not try ffmpeg.
Man, it's night and day difference. It processed my images super quick (from ~30 seconds down to ~1 second), and had surprisingly good documentation (compared to IM/GM), and allot of support on stackoverflow etc.
One thing that might help: ffmpeg is, in fact, the Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well", it just so happens that all the commands are prefixed by the ffmpeg command, but you can break things down really easily after that. Each codec is independent, mappings are independent, filters, etc.