Best rendering settings for AVI?

[kossyremp]

I work with AVI clips and render in AVI but the rendered video never seems to be anywhere near as crisp as video I edited. I am using SV 8 (I cant render in wmv or mp3 btw) and my rendering settings are:

AVI, custom template:
video rendering quality: best
frame size: hdv 720
frame rate: 29.970 (ntsc)
pixel aspect ratio: 1.0000
video format: Xvid MPEG-4 Codec
Interleave every: 0.250 seconds
audio format pcm uncompressed

Im trying to render at a YT widescreen HD setting. If you can help me I would be very grateful, thanks!

[Kariudo]

I work with AVI clips and render in AVI but the rendered video never seems to be anywhere near as crisp as video I edited. I am using SV 8 (I cant render in wmv or mp3 btw) and my rendering settings are:

AVI, custom template:
video rendering quality: best
frame size: hdv 720
frame rate: 29.970 (ntsc)
pixel aspect ratio: 1.0000
video format: Xvid MPEG-4 Codec
Interleave every: 0.250 seconds
audio format pcm uncompressed

Im trying to render at a YT widescreen HD setting. If you can help me I would be very grateful, thanks!

The settings in bold are your [potential] problems.
If you're working with 1280x720 (or higher*) footage then your frame size setting shouldn't be a problem, but you should be rendering with the same settings as your project (which should also reflect the properties of your footage.)

I wouldn't trust an editing program with encoding the finished project [for distribution,] render with a lossless codec such as Lagarith or uncompressed. You can then throw the file into any number of other programs that allow you better control of the codec settings (vdub, meGUI and Zarx264GUI come to mind)

*If you're downscaling, you might notice some quality loss because editing programs, in general, suck at resizing