It's a little more technical than using Quicktime, but I think you'll get the best results from using FFmpeg. Taking in a bunch of JPEGs and outputting a movie file is bread and butter for this command line app.

Their official site is: http://www.ffmpeg.org/ but you're probably better off grabbing ffmpegx, a mac gui client for ffmpeg, which also give instructions for installing everything you need:

http://ffmpegX.com/download.html

My experience with ffmpeg is with the command line only so I'll explain that. Once you've installed ffmpeg, let's look at how you could use it from the terminal:

Assuming you have a directory of sequentially named jpeg files (001.jpg, 002.jpg, 003.jpg etc) you'd just run the command:

ffmpeg -r 10 -b 1800 -i %03d.jpg test.mp4

There is plenty more tweaking you can do. But to explain the arguments above:

"-r 10" is the framerate, 10 frames per second.
"-b 1800" is the bitrate or quality. 1800 gives a high quality movie. You can lower this figure if you want a smaller movie file.

There are plenty of other options for adjusting the size, movie format etc. There may be a bit of a learning curve to getting it set up but I think it's the solution you're after.

Because it's a command line application it is very easy to schedule automatic daily jobs etc. (through cron or other scheduling systems).

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