Rendering audio while still keeping a crisp image.

Hello there, I’m on with a current Halloween project at the moment. I rendered out a test animation (to view the lighting, see if the tone and everything works and also to promote the hallonween special) however, the footage comes out looking terrible, further exacerbated when posted online (as seen below)

I have seen rendered animations created in blender, looking crisp, with audio so I know it’s possible to do, I’m just struggling with finding out how. I have tried to check the internet for an answer but it seems I’m either the only one stupid enough to experience this problem, or I’m just wording it wrong and the search engine isn’t picking up the answer.

Either way, any help please? It would be truly appreciated.

Are you saying that if you leave out the audio, it looks crisper? If not, I’m not sure what the audio has to do with anything. Other than that, your question seems to be “How do I make my render look better?”, which is a huge question. Can you point out what in the video you’re not finding to be “crisp” enough? Are you refering to compression artifacts making the frames look worse when you put it all into a video file? I have no idea what you want the video to look like, or what about this version looks terrible to you.

Yes, I’m saying that when I render out without the Audio, the image looks crisp. I can render the video out as AVI Jpeg and it looks crisp, it looks as normally rendered, no artifacts, though no audio. However in order to render out with audio I have to switch my output to H.264 which seems to be leaving artifacts, blurriness, frame drop. I would like to be able to render out my animation without all these artifacts. It’s not as noticeable when looking from the smaller youtube screen thankfully however when increasing to full screen, it looks horrendous.

I apollogise for being rather vague last night, it was posted in the fairly early hours of the morning.

This is cut-out of one HD frame of your movie from yt here. I wouldn’t say it’s blurry or with artifacts:
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=77876

Blender’s encoder is a crippled version of ffmpeg. Typically you need access to tools that simply aren’t available in Blender’s UI. See if you can increase the bitrate also change the minimum bitrate to equal the max bitrate. Perhaps try another codec but don’t expect great results from h264.