Re: The Long Way Home (an adventure in cinematography)
It must be the AVI codec you are using. I have never found success with AVI, they are like JPGs, they remove color data, and pixelate if not configured properly.
AVI is a container, not a codec. You can use different codecs within the .AVI structure and it is one of the primary standards for uncompressed video on PCs.
.mp4 is a container, too, although it's often associated with the h.264 codec which sounds like it's probably what you're talking about.
On my projects, I use uncompressed AVI files ("YUV" uncompressed codec setting or similar) but they are somewhat huge files.
Typically, I work with uncompressed .avis until the end of production. Then I convert it all to h.264 before uploading to the web.