[Peter Berthet]

yeah it sounds like what your doing is double rendering things, which always kills quality

as vince said, quicktime animation is great if you can get away with it, especially if your dropping things into a PPRO timeline

“However, the difference is that if I take the AE generated AVI straight into Encore and spit a DVD out, the footage is clean, crisp. But if I take it into PPro first (which I have to do to insert, add, or overlay it into the video footage already captured), it comes out looking horrible. ”

as far as what your saying there is that,

AE spits out an avi (one render)
that clip then comes into PPRO and gets exported out to dvd (2nd render)

if your doing that sort of thing its fine workflow wise, but check your export settings, assuming your working (for examples sake)
DV PAL 25fps standard def stuff
then your export from AE would be either

DV PAL 10bit uncompressed 720×576
or
QT Animation 720×576

either of those will preserve the maximum image quality without compression, so when you bring them into PPRO theyre not going to lose any quality when you do your final export

from the sounds of it your just double handling the clips, hence the quality loss

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Peter Berthet]

avi is typically compressed

compression = loss of image quality

if you want to maintain a high quality export from AE then ensure that you send it out as 10bit uncompressed DV (i assume thats what your working in)

alternatively export the pieces of footage that your applying titles to from PPRO into AE (uncompressed), add your effects and then relink the clips back into PPRO

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Peter Berthet]

make sure your graphics drivers are up to date for your radeon card

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Peter Berthet]

multi-coloured static sounds like a tape problem, if thats the case theres not a whole lot you can do

(and id say the video file was ‘Bushed’)

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Peter Berthet]

yeah it basically says blah blah blah ..h264 export = win 🙂

i do believe youtube have upped their resolution allowance now too

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Peter Berthet]

this might sound silly but do you have speed effecets on your vision at the points where the sound gets all chipmunked up ?

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Peter Berthet]

damn it Eddie, you beat me to it 🙂

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Peter Berthet]

yeah , in that case definately odd that your getting poor performance

i was running some tests doing the same thing you described on a laptop that isnt even close to the spec of your system and it ran fine.

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Peter Berthet]

what happens if you create a new multi-cam sequence starting at the point where it corrupts in the main timeline?

gut feeling says memory problem (knowing adobe)

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Peter Berthet]

just out of interest what sort of system are you running, so far the experience ive had with CS4 is that its been faster to complete most tasks than cs3 (certainly crashes less)

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia