Videos clearer than stills.

I had taken about 40 stills and 3 short videos of a racoon in my yard, and the videos look much beter than the still shots.

All were taken with the same camera settings on my 1D MKIV with 300 2.8L IS mounted.

Has anyone else experienced this?

No, but I don't shoot video.

When you are looking at the still images, did you resize them and sharpen for a screen type resolution?

What happens when you "freeze frame" the video? It's quite common for the noise in a series of video frames to get "averaged" by the brain ( a bit like image stacking in astronomy shots) so the eye/brain sees less noise in the clip. Scaling can do the same too.

Video at 1080p is a file 1920 x 1080 pixels, MUCH smaller than a 16MP image. Compress a 16MP RAW down to 2MP and tell me if they look similar

Yup. It's because the video is getting processed by your brain to fill in all the scrappy bits of info and to average the results. Try freezing the video and you'll see that individual frames look terrible compared to the still image.