How come the clarity of my videos are bad?

Well i made a small movie with my digital video camera (some panasonic one cost me $800) I put the videos into my editing program, edited them and they looked good quality, then i exported them at mpeg or mpg and then as i watched them in windows media player they were bad quality... i want it good quality so it looks good for youtube. Is there a better format i can convert it into (i got a converter) to make it look better?

There could be a number of things that cause "clarity" of your videos to degrade. One of the simplist things to consider is the "size" difference between your editing software, and when you watch it on Windows Media Player. The larger your playback size, like half screen or full screen, the more pixellated your picture becomes.

Another consideration is the number of pixels "clarity" on your camera; some of the earlier cameras had a maximum of 640K (thousand) pixels, many now are listed in mega (million) pixels. The more pixels you have, the larger you can make your playback screen and still maintain a crisper, cleaner video.

The last thing I can suggest to you is to see if you can adjust your bitrate speed before you start recording your video to mpeg format. The bitrate sets the speed at which the video is formatted to mpeg for playback. In other words, a lower bitrate speed may cause a few frames or bits of video to be deleted during the conversion process to mpeg, so when the video is played back, there is "less information", therefore making your video appear grainy, and degraded. A higher bitrate includes virtually all of the video information during conversion to an mpeg file, so playback may aquire some problems if your processor isn't fast enough to keep up. The trick is to find a "happy medium", which may be from 3000 to 6000 bits per second (bps). Hope this helps you.
leroberts1@verizon.net

it must be that u when u finally made the movie after u finished editing them, u chose a quality thats very less or was set previously in the options...all u have to do is when u create movie choose "best for my computer" or "for preview in my computer" or "for broadband connections."
either theses menu or options that ,mean the same would be there chose them and go be good director.
also check in the options video or quality section

If possible export as a .mov or .wmv file, or even better (for youtube, that is), FLV. If you export as a quicktime file, use a mpeg-4 encoder or h.264, both of these provide decent quality video for a small file size. If you use .wmv, choose a variable bit rate option, 2-pass VBR preferable, and check to make sure the quality is on high. Just make sure your video is under 10 minutes AND 100 MB. Otherwise youtube won't allow you to upload. Hope this helps!