We just switched over to a 16:1 video camera and had a lot of problems with our old compression software as it wouldn't do a widescreen mpeg-1 so we had to find new compression software.
This is the test clip that we had everyone try and what is the settings we settled on.
http://cleoslinks.com/crap/test5.mpg
We are now using Compression Master 3 to encode stuff. (We were using Compressor which is part of Final Cut Pro)
http://www.popwire.com/product_info.php?products_id=2