Hi Doug. That's not nearly as poor a first image as you think. I speak from personal experience!
Is there any chance that you could let us know what settings you used to capture these AVIs?
That will give us a good starting point for any tips or pointers.
As far as capture is concerned, one of the big things is to make sure your histogram is properly exposed and that you're capturing the full dynamic range of the object.
K3CCDTools has a meter you can activate which serves OK as a guide. Try to get the reading over 200. Somewhere around 215-200 is even better, but you'll have to experiment with your exposure and other settings to get it to that point.
Can you also tell us what you're doing in your processing? Have you downloaded Registax?
Hope that's OK for a beginning bit of advice. That stuff about the histogram is important and was good advice I received when I was getting more serious about imaging. (Thanks those folks who offered that advice, BTW
)
Keep asking questions.
