[TD912]

Every time you convert to another lossy format, you lessen the quality.

Think of it as taking a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, etc. It gets worse each time. Plus many half-baked programs are not very efficient when converting. It's one of the reasons why so many amateur videos on YouTube look blurry. If possible, exporting directly to a .mov would be best.

If you can't, set the bitrate for the .wmv relatively high, around 1500kbps for SD content. When you convert to a .mov, set it also around 1500kbps and make sure the video codec is set to H264. This way more of the information is retained. The higher the better, but the larger the file and the longer it takes to encode. There is a lot more to encoding video than that, but those are just some general guidelines.

If it weren't for the submission rules, I would have suggested using Handbrake, as it is relatively easy to use, outputs high quality files using the well-known x264 encoder, and is free. But Handbrake does not output to a .mov file.

I'm not sure why a .mov file is specifically required by FIRST/Autodesk, as the .mov container is slowly being depreciated by Apple in favor of .mp4, which is the standard container for H.264 and AAC audio, which is used in everything from iPods to Blu-ray players. Even standard YouTube video is streamed in H.264 inside a Flash player.