Making mpeg4

So, instead of making animated gifs, making mpeg4 with libx264 results in faster, smaller higher quality images.

 avconv -i pics/%05d.png -c:v libx264 -tune stillimage [-crf 23 -preset fast] output.mp4 

Note that you have to use the C style syntax %05d for the file names, if you use glob (*) you'll overwrite all of your images, beware!

-crf sets the quality from 0 to 50, 0 being the best
-preset does some presets, ultrafast, fast, slow, etc
-qp 0  for lossless

But for 1000 pngs, this gives a nice 4 M movie of high quality.  E.g.