Codec question about Quicktime

Question

Greetings All,
I've been rumaging through the help files here at Adobe as well as the internet in general and haven't been able to find the answers I'm looking for so I'm hoping someone here can help.
Before I get in to the questions, a little background on what I'm doing...forgive me if I get a bit long winded here as I try to explain.  In the smallest nutshell possible, basically I've been creating some short videos, both from Maya animations I've created (I'm a college art student among other things) as well as some pretty basic home videos taken with various camcorders (2 digital one older Video 8 converted to digital).  Until recently I've been using Premeire CS3 for creating my videos and I have been exporting to the Quicktime format with the Sorenson 3 codec.  As I'm using my little video files for multiple uses (computer playback and DVD authoring, etc) and as I'm doing this on both PC's and Mac's (I use PC's at home but have to use Mac's at school), the Sorenson 3 codec has provided the BEST quality of anything I've tried so far on both PC's and Mac's...and having the files reasonably sized has been a bonus of course. Also, I'm not doing anything "Hi Def" here...the files are basically DV standard - 720x480 (although some of them do get played back on a big projector screen in a couple of classrooms at the college...they've still looked great though).
So far, so good...except that I recently purchased a small Sony digital camcorder (a DCR-SX44 in case it matters) and it seems that Premeire CS3 will not recognise the .mpg files from the new Sony.  From what I gather, it has something to do with the audio format that Sony uses.  Either way I picked up a used copy of Premeire CS4 from a friend at school (couldn't go with cs5 because I'm still running Windows XP 64 here at home and CS5 apparently wants Windows 7). While it will load the mpgs from the Sony just fine, all of a sudden the export video I'm creating with the Quicktime/Sorenson 3 looks REALLY bad.  In fact, after playing around with this for the past couple of weeks, I can't really find a codec, either AVI or Quicktime that produces anywhere near the same quality as the Sorenson thru CS3 (including the H.264).  It's also worth noting that where this problem is -really- evident is with text, intros and credits and such...the text looks really awful now, although the degridation in the actual video is quite apparent as well.  Which leads me to the questions...
1.)  What the devil happened that the Sorenson 3 looks like crap in CS4?  It seems to be the EXACT same codec, so I can only assume that somehow Premeire or this Adobe Media Encorder are somehow handling the codec differently or something.
2.)  ANY suggestions as to how to fix this...either with the Sorenson 3 or another codec?
I'm starting to think this isn't actually a codec issue as much as something with either Premeire or AME...somehow the video is getting mucked up a bit before it actually get's to the codec stage of the encoding.  If the Sorenson 3 is the same codec I've been using (and it still works great in CS3) that would seem to indicate it's not actually the codec itself but something else...either in Premeire or AME...although I'm not sure where to begin looking.
So that said, again in a nutshell...Premeire CS3 with Sorenson 3 - great video quality (with both the videos and the animation).  CS4 with virtually any codec I've tried (and I've tried -a lot-) mediocre to terrible quality.  -Why-?
I'm grateful for any suggestions that folks may have here.

Answer 1

I appreciate your comment...thank you.  While DVD isn't really my primary concern...mostly just being able to play the files on PC's and Macs so I can show them at school and such as well as a Youtube vid here and there (which is a different can of worms), with the CS3 you can actually see the difference in quality with the Sorenson on DVD.  I actually just burned a DVD for my father with a Maya animation I recently did and I also put an older animation on the disk as well...the older animation had been created with uncompressed AVI and the new one with the Sorenson 3 and there was actually a rather significant difference...we watched it on my Dad's 37" flat panel and the Sorenson quality was noticably much better.
BTW...I tried the Animation option for Quicktime with the CS4 after watching a Youtube tut...nadda...quality was awful (although I don't know about that with the CS3).  I had forgot to mention in the original post though...yes, the Maya animations are REALLY affected by whatever is causing this.  That's how I got turned on to the Sorenson in the first place as my Maya teacher had suggested it.  The AVI's I did for the Maya animations looked decent enough here at home (I think I had used Video 1 back then) but they really looked like crap on the Macs at school.  They were pretty simple animations and I rendered them in Maya at really outragous quality...pretty much max settings on everything using Mental Ray at 1600x1200 but the actual vid just kept coming off soft and fuzzy...lacking any sharpness, until I started using the Sorenson.
That said, after a bit more experimentation this morning, I've found that the DV NTSC setting under Microsoft AVI is actually doing a pretty decent job (with video..haven't tried any Maya stuff there yet)...on my PC at least.  Won't be able to check it on a Mac for a couple of days though (obviously I've had -a lot- of problems with AVI's on Macs).
Now...you said that you've "heard here that there was a change in par in cs4 to deal with some standards"...could you (or someone) possibly elaborate on that a little? 
Thanks