[BruceJ]

Also keep in mind when you render your images in 3ds max whether you are going to do any compositing with those images.

Compositing is like how they do "blue/green screening" to combine live actors and CG backgrounds in movies.
It requires having alpha channels in the images so other images can be seen through the alpha channel when the images are layered on top of each other, like in Adobe Photoshop.

If you plan to do any compositing, then the rendered images should be a format that supports alpha channels such as TIFF or TARGA. As far as I know, JPG doesn't support alpha channels.

These formats are a larger file size, but once it's all loaded into a program such as Adobe Premiere, then the editing program will compress it when it is converted to the Quicktime movie. I suggest the output from the editing program be the only and last time a compression such as Quicktime is used.
In other words, use raw TIFF/TARGAs for images and WAV for music/sounds until the entire movie is just the way you like it, then convert it all to Quicktime.

-Bruce
Animation mentor, team 111