when rendering a video, what codec should i use that would be viewable in most PCs, especially PCs without admin privileges?
.AVI it stands for 'Audio-Video-Interchange' i'm pretty sure every OS comes with .AVI as standard. Divx or Xvid is availble for every OS too, but needs to be installed by the user.
.avi is not a codec, it's just a file extension. DIVX and Xvid needs to be installed and therefore PCs with no admin privileges cannot view them.
for the best compatibility, what you want to use is either windows media or the latest version of flash. the free windows media encoder from microsoft will let you use two-pass vbr encoding, while you have to pay for encoding software to get that capability with flash.
can these be used with the production software that i currently have? WME looks like a production software on its own.
Encode the video as MPEG, I think on every computer works MPEG-1. Another solution for you is to provide them with the player. mplayer needs not to be installed and plays any format. here is a link: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html
mpeg is indeed very compatible on pcs... it's been the gold standard for years... the reason that nobody uses it any more is because the file size is so big. you can access a version of the wme from the timeline of editing apps like sony vegas and adobe, but you can also export dv avi's to your hdd, and use the wme to encode those.