Is there a way to improve the quality of the titles? I've noticed that unless it is just plain white on black, the titles tend to be very splotchy in an mpeg 1 or AVI rendering. I'm looking for the clarity that one finds in professional productions.
MPEG titles will always lack somewhat. MPEG is a lossy format, and colors are usually the first things to suffer. What type of AVI did you attempt to make? (codec)
I tried to make a PAL AVI movie, just to see if there was any difference. The titles look really bad when I have a red background with black lettering. The red is needed in the movie, and the movie has to be an mpeg 1 movie for easy distribution on CD.
Red is often a problem in digital video. In both DV and MPEG, red is only sampled with 1/4 the resolution of the rest of the image so it will always look blockier. About the only solution is to have less color contrast between the title and the background or to use a different format than DV or MPEG. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like these are possible for you.