Awesome advice, guys. Thanks.
Now for the good-bad news!
The good news is that I got Huffyuv to render my files beautifully. The bad news is that Lagarith kept hanging. :/ Couldn't get a whole file done with it. Also, Lagarith's quality in comparison to Huffyuv wasn't even close. I don't know if that's because of the tweaking I did or if Huffyuv is just producing a nicer result, or even if it's the program I use. More experimentation may follow later. (I'll get ahold of VirtualDubMod, maybe--Virtual Dub wasn't really ringning any bells for me.)
The bad-bad news is that I don't have enough room on this (1.5 year-old) hard drive to store all the files I need to construct the AMV's I will be working on. I just bought a new video board, more RAM, a couple of thumb drives... and I'm so broke it ain't funny. Sooooooooooooooooo............
Until I can get a couple of massive drives in this system, I'm going to have to (gasp) stick with the WMV's just for the sake of space concerns.
25 minute videos (very low complexity) were coming in at 15G each. With a tiny series of 13 videos, that equals almost 200G. Since I just reformatted my HD recently, yanking extraneous software... well, you can see where I might not have much room to move, what with the gaggle of OS, Office, and video programs installed on the machine. Heh. Even pulling WoW off of my system would only let me store half an episode. ;P
On the bright side, the WMV LOOKS good, and that's half the battle, but yes there's problems using it. Soon as I can (damn, I knew I shouldn't have gotten those tattoos...), I'm going to see about getting some nice HD's to store files on. I'd debated a HD instead of a video board, but... I think I made the right choice going with the board first.
I will likely experiment with it some more when I can by doing things like simply leaving out the original audio (not strictly needed in AMV production) when re-encoding, chopping unneeded bits off (ends, beginnings, and the kitchen sink), and whatever else I can thinik of.
The pre-rendering is a great idea, though, and I thank you guys for it. That will help a LOT with the amount of time it takes to edit video, especially when timing is crucial.
You guys rock.
