Why is Pinnacle Studio making my videos look like crap?

[Deimos Anomaly]

The first example clip was recorded on a Panasonic HDC-SD9 at 1080i and 25 frames per second, and saved by the camera as .mts (avchd) file.

Here is what it looks like uploaded raw, directly from the camera's memory card to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAqqAPkxfQE

And here is what it looks like after going through Pinnacle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkKNZVvGc4U

Hmmm... perhaps I should have used a different clip, this one features sky prominently which makes the effect harder to see. You can see it on the plane though, and on the landscape in the later part of the vid. The entire video seems to have fine horizontal lines running across it when it comes through pinnacle studio.

The second clip was recorded on a Contour Roam helmet camera at 1080p and 30 frames per second. It was saved by the camera as a .mov (quicktime) file.

Raw from memory card: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYQfYfq4l9s

Via Pinnacle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aezpTfNmMN4

The quality degredation is a lot more obvious there.

Here is what pinnacle looked like when I was ready to upload, so it was definitely supposed to be 1080...

 

[Robert Maxwell]

What video codec is Pinnacle exporting to?

What sort of compression options do you have set?

These look like compression artifacts so it's most likely a setting in Pinnacle or whatever codec you're sending the video to.