I am working on a annimation rendering and have found that if any compression is used within the .avi annimation saving settings the white surfaces (simulated white walls) end up a little blotchy especially with movement. Without compression the file is fine and clear. Problem is that an 8 second video uncompressed is 4Gb which is too large for anything to open. If I shorten the video to 2 seconds media players can open it. This is okay except the end video is to be a minute long so that will require 30 videos to piece together. There has got to be a better solution.
Let me know if anyone else has had this problem and has a fix.
Shawn, the stock encoders that come with Windows are woefully out of date. For that reason AVI's tend to come out lousy.
What I would suggest is rendering to still frame format. I think your choices are BMP and TGA. It's better if you render to BMP and use Microsoft Image Manager or GIMP to convert them to JPG or PNG.
In the best of all worlds you've got Adobe CS6 with that groovey H.264 encoder or the camtasia codec.
In the not-so-best world you've got Microsoft Movie Maker for stitching those images into a video sequence. You can then atleast mess around with combinations of compression levels and CODECS to try to improve it.