Real Media looks like crap

Hey guys, long time member here, haven't posted in a very long time. Any way...

I've been working on a Flash cartoon for a couple of years now. It's balooned in both length, complexity, and file size (gonna be about 15 minutes, would be 8 or 9 mega bites in Flash, and I use so many Swift 3D created visuals that it can't even manage to play smoothly on my pretty fast computer wen it's in the form of an SWF file). I realized the project was heading in this direction about half way through (I know, it's horrible, I'm breaking Flash-Rule #1) and resigned my self to presenting the toon as a streaming video.

So, the toons just about done now, and so I started fiddling around with the export options in After Effects 6 (I load in the swf and export it as a video). My first try with .wmv came out GREAT. Relativly small file (33 MB, not too horrible for a 10 minute video (that's what I tested with), when we're talking streaming media) and it looked crisp and clear and realitivly free from compression artifacts. But I quickly found that my web host doesn't support WMV, only Real Media. So I thought, "Fine, I'll just export as .rmvb." I exported with the highest possible settings allowed in After Effects (I think) and... It looks like crap! Full of artifacts, jaggies everywhere, white at the edges of objects... Just doesn't look nearly as good as the WMV file looked (that file looked damn near perfect!).

So, after all this rambling we come to the crux of my question: is Real Media just not suited to Flash-created animation? Or am I just doing something wrong when exporting it (please tell me I'm just doing something wrong when exporting it). Have any of you had success presenting your Flash toons with Real? Anyone seen a Flash toon presented in Real that looked good? If so, could you let me know? Thanks a lot guys, I'll be urgently awaiting your responses.

By the way, if you want to see some tests I did with Real (to gauge how bad it looks) you can check it out at alloftheabove.net/testy.ram .

do you want to play this streaming via the web?

why not export from flash as an avi... then import it back into a new flash movie and have it play through that?
it should run fine as there is no vector to slow it down, and u should be able to load it on the web on any host?

solution!

p.s real media looks like crap!

That's a really good idea. I'll give it a try and let you know how it turns out.

By you're footer I'll say you havn't posted here for a while :)