Does anybody have a known reliable way to create a video from a series of image files? Before you mod me down for not searching for the answer before posting the question,
After working with it a while and taking a look at x264 and VideoLan, I went back to Splicer. It turns out that the cryptic error message was due to an error in my code.
It looks like Splicer will do what I want: programmatically create videos from a series of images.