[Jeff Thompson]

Thanks Rueben, fantastic suggestion – should have been obvious to look into codecs. I’ve had great success in the past in Final Cut using PhotoJPEG (not supported by my installation of ffmpeg) and PNG (which is, and is the format for the source images so that helps a lot too).

For others, the following command seems to do great with little to no artifacting or blurring on flat areas of color:

ffmpeg -y -r 24 -i %04d.png -c:v png test.mov