How to create a movie from 5000 PNG files?

Question

Well, simple situation. I've created about 5000 frames as PNG files which I want to display as an animation inside a .NET application. Every image is 1920x1080 in size and the PNG file uses alpha channels for (partial) transparency. And that's going to complicate things a bit, because I would prefer to keep it transparent. (But if that's impossible, I'll just add a background image to every PNG.)

Because of the large amount of images, I would need lots of memory. Well, a 1 TB harddisk and a 12 GB Quad-core Intel Xeon system running Vista 64-bits is solving those memory requirements. But unless a tool is created to support 64-bits, it will probably choke after loading perhaps 800 of the 5000 images. So I need a tool that can do this.

The movie format isn't that important. Neither is compression, as long as the image quality stays high. (And there's a reason why I've used such a huge resolution!) Lossless compression would be preferred, though. My system is fast enough to replay the movie afterwards again so I'm not worried about it's speed. However, image quality is the most important factor here.

So far, I've come up with two options: 1) I find some free tool which can handle this much data. (Free, or very cheap.) 2) I write such a tool myself...

Option 1 is a bit out-of-place here. Besides, as a software engineer, my hands are just twitching to write it myself! In C# with preferably no third-party libraries. So my question: - Where to start writing this myself?

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(In case you're wondering, this movie is an animation where a young woman is walking through the streets of some city, passing several signs which mention features of a product. At the end of the movie, she walks up to a bigger sign which shows the name of the product itself. And it's one long, continuous scene, no breaks. And real fun to create too! And about 10 GB of images...)

Answer 1

if you are on windows, you can also look into virtualdub. http://www.virtualdub.org/

it can make AVIs from bmps, pngs, etc.