When I render to avi, mov, and others, the output is very grainy

Hi,

I am a first time user of vegas 9.0e pro after coming from avid liquid. I am trying to create just a simple video which has some jpegs and some avi video. When I preview it, it looks fine but as soon as I try to render, it dislays grainy output and the resultant avi.mov,wmv is also grainy.

I have read some of the similar threads and one relating to pro 10 seems to indicate I might have a less than stellar codec. Is there anyway to know if this is the case?

Is my best solution to just try and reload and see what happens? I hate to lose what I have already done with a couple of videos.

Thanks for listening...

I forgot to ask what templates you were using to make the avi, mov and wmv files.

" Any help in this area?"

What does it say in the render template box?

Make sure your preview window is set to Best/Full to judge quality.
If the preview window shows grainy video, you may have accidentally applied an FX to your video.
Where did the original video come from and was it good or marginal quality?

"With regards to the video, I am getting the grainy look when rendering jpegs taken at a high resolution so I don't think it has anything to do with the input quality."

The standard recommendation is to ensure that, unless you're doing deep zooms on them, keep your stills at no more than 2X your project settings.
For standard NTSC DV, this would mena images no larger than 1440 x 960 pixels.
IrfanView is a great (and free) tool to do image resizing and much more.

" That being said, is it possible that I could have applied this grainy look to the entire video timeline as opposed to just a few items on the timeline? And if so, is there a way to know if I did this?"

FX can be applied at 3 different places as shown below.
Note that the output is the only one that has an FX on it, as indicated by it's green colour.

Hooray!!!
Now get back to playing around and learning a great piece of software :-)