Got it sorted.

• 

  Steven Blair did you de-interlace?  double check it.

   

• 

  Dan Voluntarist Lyons I will! Thanks!

• Steven Blair I never read through your whole post there.  Deinterlace normally only needs to be done when you are importing mpg 1,2,4 or AVI,  but I say click it anyways.  It causes all kinds of problems here with people bringing me footage they say is not working.  That almost always fixes it.

• Steven Blair I only see stills but if the static areas look find and the people make crazy weird water like effect when there is movement... that's a deinterlace.

• Dan Voluntarist Lyons Think that this thread is relevant? http://forums.adobe.com/thread/388591
  

  Adobe Forums: Media Encoder does NOT deinterlace properly forums.adobe.com

  Please explain your need for an option. The  only time de-interlacing is require...See More
• Dan Voluntarist Lyons I'm giving it a shot with lower fields first, high quality profile, since CS4 doesn't give you a de-interlace option.

• Steven Blair yeah it does bro,  right click on the video (in the timeline).  Click on "field options"  and then click the radio button that says "de-interlace"

• Dan Voluntarist Lyons Holy , you are Godlike. THANK YOU!! How did I not know that?

• Steven Blair I can't believe you've been editing this long without deinterlacing your clips haha,  I deinterlace EVERYTHING.

• Dan Voluntarist Lyons I don't know. I'm about to go flog myself as penance.

• Steven Blair Did it work is the important thing.

• Dan Voluntarist Lyons I'll let you know the moment the render finishes! Dude. Seriously. I think this just completely changed my game.

• Steven Blair you can also do a ghetto deinterlace but bumping it up to 50fps and clicking the de3interlace option in the encoder.  You effectively slice your video into ... a  load of bitmaps.  Then it squishes them all back together making a video that plays like an old school cartoon.

   

• Dan Voluntarist Lyons Huh, interesting. I'll give it a shot.

• Steven Blair You need 50fps because there is two fields per second,  it's like a progressive fps.  So you end up with 25 fps of footage that is smooth like butter.

   

• Steven Blair Heh,  I'm actually getting good at this.
  

  
  
  Yes, he is. All hail Big Steve. Thanks everyone!

Welp, the issue is cropping up again. I THOUGHT I had it solved, but arrrrrr, curses! It has reared its ugly head again, and this time the deinterlacing has no effect. It's like fighting the borg, it adapts to my solutions and keeps coming back.

It doesn't look so bad after being uploaded to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOmReq878DU

However, when watching it in Adobe Media player locally on my computer, it looks... Suboptimal. I still see a glitchy, blocky mess much like this:

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/7349/renderglitch2.jpg

http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/9598/renderglitch1.jpg

I'm also wondering if this has anything to do with my computer's video codecs, as it doesn't look that bad on youtube.