Shadows in render are noisy Edit: This post is not a duplicate to this question as I am using Blender Render, and not Cycles Render. Blender Render and Cycles seem to have very different options and work very differently. The answers to the the question this post may be a possible duplicate of do not help in Blender Render, only in Cycles.

Edit 2: Here's a link to a file with a letter, floor plane, camera, and lamp.

Nearly all my shadows in my render appear noisy/grainy, and I can't find anything that will fix it. I would like to note that I am using Blender Render and not Cycles Render. I've tried making the shadow samples for the lamp (which is a Spot lamp, although the lamp type doesn't seem to change anything) very high, but this did nothing. I've also tried turning up the soft size, using Constant QMC, toggling mipmaps, changing to Buffer Shadow instead of Ray Trace Shadow, and turning on/off World light settings. All of these either did nothing, or made the issue worse. I'm still a little amateur with Blender, so any and all help is appreciated! Thank you!

Also, here is some images. As seen in this first image, the un-rendered version, the shadows are completely fine.

In this image, which is a part of the rendered version, you can see that that the shadows are noisy.
If you want less noise, increase the Samples under Gather in the World settings of the properties panel.

The gather panel:


  Samples
  The number of rays used to detect if an object is occluded. Higher numbers of samples give smoother and more accurate results, at the expense of slower render times. The default value of 5 is usually good for previews. The actual number of rays shot out is the square of this number (i.e.Samples at 5 means 25 rays). Rays are shot at the hemisphere according to a random pattern (determined by the sample methods described above); this causes differences in the occlusion pattern of neighboring pixels unless the number of shot rays is big enough to produce good statistical data.