It may be that I just don't have the professional equipment to create the best images but here goes - I am creating a landscape with sand and shasta rock as a texture. The camera flys over the landscape and the rocks look good and the smooth sand ok but then the shasta rock looks like it's crawling with millions of insects as the animation plays. Single frames look good - animation looks grainy/noisey.

I am suspecting that the noise generated in the texture moves slightly as each individual fram is rendered therefore giving the appearance of moving and dancing wihen the frames clip by at 24 fps.

I am using Sony Vegas to put the images in the  timeline. I am using PNG format.  This "noise" is evident when I play it back on my 20" computer monitor - the noiser the bump on the texture - the more graininess/noise I get in the animation. A single frame actually looks good. If I take out all bump then things really looks good when played but doesn't have the detail to look realistic.

So I have rendered at 480 height, 720 height and a 960 height in a 16x9 format. I am now going to 1920x1080.  I do notice that the higher the pixels - the effect is less but it never quite clears up.  I am authoring to DVD 24P widescreen and when you play it on a large DLP well you can really see the artifacts....Thoughts? Suggestions?

I am not sure what is causing this, what come to my mind is that the Shasta rock material is a very old one, been there in the collections since at least Vue3 and surely uses a basic repeater for bump production. Basic repeaters are "fake" fractals, they simply repeat a noise pattern along the geometry, instead of giving infinite detail as true fractals do. So maybe this is the cause of the artifacts. Maybe you should try and edit this basic repeater in the function editor and up the number of repetitions, or change it for a simple fractal and edit this fractal. Of course this means fiddling in the function editor, but it may be the cause of your problem.
You could also try enabling texture AA instead of changing the noise, but be sure to uncheck "recompute subrays", this option will take forever to render and is only useful on reflective/transparent materials, and only in very few cases.
You say you edit your animation to DVD, so I assume you are using an mpeg2 compression? What if you output to a non compressed format? Do you still see artifacts?
Also, have you tried a non compressed image format for your single frames? I know png is supposed to be lossless, but how about trying tiff or tga, so you are 100% sure png isn't the culprit?

I have Esprit  6 and cannot find the texture AA check box. I don't know if Esprit has this.  I am going to try making the fractal simple as I have fiddled around a bit with the materials.  What about making it a displacement material instead - does that change the way the noise is generated??

I am usinig mpg-2 compression designed for authoring at 24p Widescreen for DVD Architect. Single frames in the time line are super sharp on the large screen but when I space through them even on the timeline in VEGAS I can see the change in noise pattern from frame to frame as I press the ==> key - so this means that each frame is rendered that way.  I will try putting to uncompressed AVI when I render from Vegas but I expect the same result given the previous sentence.
I will also try TIFF to see if any of this improves too - my guess is that it is the noise pattern generated by VUE that looks fine on a single frame but creates unintended "movement" when viewing in an animation.  Thanks for you response.

okay more information. check this video out on youtube. When you see the broadcast quality render - look at the terrain and you'll see what I am talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMTNC1Ujeq0

Secondly, do the kickstart tutorial in VUE 6.  Have the camera move in on the coconut tree. Look at the terrain and look at the leaves.  there is all sort of artifacting/noise around these items as I mention above.  I thought Broadcast quality was a good setting for an animation.  Make your animation stop for a second or two and when the camera stops - the noise goes away pretty much.  So the issue is fly over by the camera when I see this.....

This has a bit to do with the parenting of the texture to the object,which is assigning a shader node,and then choosing the mode of the parenting; i.e. World Parametric for instance. What seperates the high-end applications from the more affordable hobbyist apps (besides price LOL)  is a LOT of programming which means more tools and more options to said tools.
Textures by nature are dependent on the "view" used to map the textures.World Parametric vs. Object Parametric for instance, will appear different in Vue.  Add motion and render an animation,and you have this come into play as a sort of texture swimming or artefact noise.The object keeps it's place, but the textures tend to stretch to fit the camera angle.Trust me, high end apps,like Maya or 3D Max, have this problem.I would try differing mapping nodes in Vue and render very short sequences and see what happens.I'm very new to Vue,and I'm still figuring out the mapping,but this holds true in most every 3D program that uses texture nodes.

Vue has grown tremendously since Vue4.It is becoming an application used by the large production houses for film work.E-On has brought these features to us at a very affordable price.Infinite or XStream is about 1/3 the price of 3D Max or Maya.Terragen has an awesome texture rendering engine,but it's still very hard to add plants,objects,etc Give E-On a little time and Vue will rival the high end applications one day.I'm sure rendering and mapping tools are always being looked at the folk at E-On as improvements for the next major build.Till then, just try differing modes and work with the bump mapping,too. I just went through this with mapping the Dead Tree I'd messed with in the plant editor recently.  Happy rendering!

THanks! So what you're saying is find something that work when you go into the function editor and goof around with the different materials - correct?  Should I world vs object parametric -? Is this even a choice in VUE Esprit ?  haven't seen that yet in the program.

And, knowing that this is not unusual then am I wasting my time trying to figure out if PNG vs TIFF works best or 960x540 vs 1920x1080 vs 1280x720 as far as resolutions?  And one more thing does the object AA have ANYTHING to do with this or am I wasting my time tweaking all of this given the limitations you mention?  

Oh and if this is in fact a limitation in VUE and other 3D programs then why do the sample renders on the EON site and what we see in Movies looks so fantastic - no texture swimming, etc.?  Do they not use texture mapping but instead create really detailed objects?  thank you!!

I don't feel it's a matter of wasting time, but taking the time to tweak paramenters. To be honest, I don't  have Esprit and I'm not familiar with the options in that build of Vue.

About 2 weeks ago,I started a WIP and I could not for the life of me properly texture a tree that I had included in the scene and then modified to fit what I'd wanted in the plant editor.I asked around on this board,and other boards about this.I, too, have used a large texture map 1200x1000 for this one tree.Tried every option,the tree never did map properly. I ended up hiding the worst parts behind some other plants.I liked the lighting I was getting,and tried an animation.Same as yours, I had that "swimming" as it was described to me.I've described it back to you as it was described to me,and I've nutshelled it a bit from the responses of about 12 different people.Most answers came from people that use Maya and XStream.

I would think that with any product, what we see advertised would be the best that product had to offer.Map resolution and file types of the maps always play a factor, but I don't believe they are the only factors in play. Graininess in renders has been mentioned many times concerning Vue.When I tried the Maya PLE it took me a lot more work to get a mediocre render than with 3D Max,but the toolset in Maya was far more advanced.One thing suggested to me was to render much larger than intended and then resize.Another tip was to bake the illumination before the render.I haven't tried this as the animation wasn't as important to me as the still.

If you could, let us know if you find a solution for your animation.These are problems that have been presented before, I've encountered the same,and I'd like to know more.Using displacement was also suggested to me, but I took the easier road and just hid the parts of the tree that looked stretched.

I am tweaking now removing the bumps for the sand terrain. I am rendering a simple plant on a sand dune at 640x480.  The sand dune is smooth except in the distance where again I get artifacting or swimming or whatever along the edges.  It's a short 3 second piece.  Also, on the shadow of the plant that is casted on the sand - it swims like crazy even though the sand is smooth with slight rolling hills, etc.  No pebbles or rocks or sharp points.  I will link some samples later. tks for your response. 
I am hoping to have others chime in on this too....