Final Render Questions

[BadKarma]

hey, im rendering my final version of the animation and some of the quality is coming out bad. i originally rendered different scenes as avis and am combining them in adobe premier pro. now im compressing them with cinepak and some of the quality seems really poor when it was originally awesome. when it is compressing the avis objects that are high poly and have quite a bit of lighting on them are becoming very "washed out". ive tried dv-ntsc and it only seems to look even worse. would it be possible to render it as an avi if the quality is better, and then convert it 2 a .mov? any and all advice would be appreciated.