I don't know if anyone here knows a lot about video editing but I've encountered the most frustrating and seemingly stupid problem and have no clue how to resolve it, even with extensive googling I'm finding no answers. Maybe someone here has an idea of what is going on...

So I took a few videos using a flip video camera, I took the files (avi's) which look fine and tried editing them in After Effects, no matter how I exported the files the quality was much worse than the original. Whenever there is any motion these blocks of random colors seem to appear where the motion is occuring. After maybe three to four hours of trying different settings on the exporting and trying different things with the composition settings I said screw it and gave up. I then tried to use the basic video editor Windows Movie Maker, which was not going to allow me to do some of the basic (very basic) special effects I had wanted to to at least chop up the segments; however, even with that I was still losing quality (read same issue with blocks of color whenever there is motion) when I saved the new movie.

Does anyone have any clue how to address this issue? I can provide samples of the videos before and after if needed, I just feel bad posting them as they are of a coworker... This is driving me mad.

Thanks for any thoughts/tips/whatever!

-ChaseNYC