DVD video artifacts

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I am having a problem with some artifacts when encoding a new video I've
made. In the videos there are some animations I put together using
POVRAY, and during the conversion to MPEG I am getting some artifacts.

The artifacts occur predominantly in the animations, although they also
occur in some stills which have also been included in the video - this
is particularly vexing as these aren't issues related to fast motion, so
I'm really stuck.

The artifacts themselves seem to occur predominantly in regions between
areas of dark pixels and light pixels. For example, in many of the
animations I've replicated sand - this consists of a mix of black and
light brown particles. In many of the animations, particularly if the
"sand" is stationary, there will be bright pixels occurring between dark
regions. Similar artifacts occur in still images where there are
closely spaced dark and light pixels. The artifacts are much brighter
then the surrounding light/dark particles - usually white or very light
gray.

I've seen this at several MPEG qualities, but I even see it in my
"standard" high-quality setting, which until now has worked perfectly.
I'm encoding using adobe premiere 1.5. My "standard" settings are:

NTSC progressive scan, 4x3 aspect ratio (720x480), High quality, 4MB/s
variable bit rate (max 9MB/s), 2-pass encoding.

Thanx in advance.

Bryan