To get the best quality possible for the animation, save all of your original source images in as high quality a format as possible. It is easy to down-sample from there to fit the final format requirements, but you can't go the other way and add quality in if the source material is crap. For example, when you are creating the final output from 3ds Max, save all the frames in a raw uncompressed format (e.g. TIFF). Don't use any compression on these images (e.g. don't save as JPEG). Figure out whatever the maximum frame rate is that you will ever need, and render the frames based on that rate. If you are going to submit your animation as a 15fps QuickTime, and you will never use it anywhere else, then fine - go ahead and render it out at 15fps. But if it will be submitted as a 30fps (or 29.97fps) video to maximize the quality, then render it that way. Also (and this is the part that some teams overlook), if you are ever going to use your animation anywhere else - like having it shown on the local news broadcast when you win the Visualization award at the Championships (
!) - then you will want to have a broadcast-quality version ready. This is easy if you already have the frames fully rendered as a high-quality set of images at full frame rate.
Assemble the raw images into QuickTime clips using any of several utilities (e.g. VirtualDub on the PC, or GraphicConverter on the Mac). As you assemble the clips, apply the same rule - save all your working files in as high-quality format as possible. If you can, save the resulting animation clips with no compression (i.e. when selecting the codec, choose "none"). If the tool you use does not allow this, then use a codec that will allow you to dial in the level of compression. For example, use MPEG-4 with the quality set to "highest" and the maximum data rate set to something absurdly high (like 1,000MB/sec). The resulting files will be huge, but worth it.
Now it is time to assemble the clips into the final animation. If you have access to one, at this point you might consider moving the images and clips over and doing the rest of the process on a Mac (please, no Mac-vs-PC flames - I just find the tools available on a Mac for image and video manipulation easier to use and more comprehensive than their PC counterparts, and given that the required submission format is a QuickTime movie, it seems to make sense to build the movie on the native QuickTime platform to maximize the compatibility during editing). My preferred tool of choice is iMovie on a Mac. Pinnacle Studio or AVID or Adobe Premiere will do approximately the same thing on the PC side. Final Cut Pro (or Premiere for the PC) is probably an overkill solution. They will work and allow you to have a massive level of control over just about everything. But if this is the only video project you are doing, the effort to get up the learning curve with those packages probably isn't worth it (and they are expensive). iMovie is free (it is preloaded on most Macs) and the editing tools are comprehensive enough that I keep defaulting back to it for a lot of the stuff that I do, even though I have and use Final Cut Pro quite a bit.
Whichever tool you use, as you assemble the clips into your final animation the same rule of thumb will apply - save all your working versions in as high-quality and complete a format as possible. If your end submission is going to be 15fps DVCPRO-NTSC with a single mono audio channel, you still want to save all your working versions as 30fps uncompressed video with full dual-channel uncompressed stereo tracks (Linear PCM, 44.1 KHz rate, 24- or 32-bit sample size, full L-R stereo). Only when you are ready to made your final, final, final version that you will actually submit to Autodesk do you even want to consider creating a compressed version. This will ensure that your image quality is maximized, the video artifacts are kept to a minimum, and your flexibility to create other high-quality versions for other uses is maintained.
-dave