Assembling Image Sequences into Movies

It's a really bad practice to render directly to movie format. Autodesk 3ds Max is a very powerful thinker, when computing an image it has a lot of information that you want to keep around, and which will get tossed if you render to a lossy compression scheme. So never render directly to AVI or MOV,except for preview work. Always render to a sequence of images instead.
Now how do you turn that sequence into a movie file? You could do this in a basic movie maker software. The one with your Operating System itself, Windows Movie Maker. Or you can use advance video editing packages like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Remember that Final Cut Pro is Mac based software. But you don't have to go outside of 3ds Max to do this. You can use the RAM Player to load the sequence and then save it out to a movie file. But the RAM player is memory bound, and if you're on a 32 bit system that limits your assembly ability dramatically. What to do? Answer: Load the sequence in as a background.
Here are the steps.
1. Render a folder full of sequential images. Take note of the TOTAL number of frames.

2. Reset Max.

3. Click the Time Configuration button, just left of the viewport navigation tools, and change the number of frames to match the image sequence.

4. On the Render menu choose Environment.

5. On the Environment tab choose the Environment Map by clicking the large gray button that says None.

6. In the Material/Map Browser click Bitmap then click OK.

7. Navigate to the folder of images.

8. If the images are sequentially numbered you just have to pick the first in the series.

There is a sequence button that should be on by default. Instantly 3ds Max will write an Image File List (IFL) file, which is simply a text file with the every filename listed.

That IFL file will now be the Environment Map.
Tip: There is a utility called IFL Manager that lets you create and edit IFL files. This is another way to create and edit IFL files.

9. Make sure Active Time Segment is turned on, and choose Save File. Pick a filetype (MOV or AVI) and a name.

10.Click the Setup button to pick a codec. Set your quality settings and close the dialog.

11. Press Render. You should see extremely fast render times, even for high resolution files. Less than 1 second a frame.
Using this method you can easily reduce the final output resolution and Nth frame functionality at render time. You can try out different compression and quality settings to get the optimal filesize and playback speed (fps). Plus you get the joy of experiencing very fast render times - always makes you feel good.