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We have encountered this too, the “fix” is to first make sure that the sequence settings Video Processing tab says “Always render in RGB”, and that the codec is set to the blackmagic rather than apple 8/10bit, second delete any video renders, and finally export the frame to quicktime without using quicktime conversion. We then use after effects or quicktime pro to get the frame to photoshop.
Sounds like a real pain but you get used to it. Frankly I’m delighted someone else has finally noticed it, it is a huge bug but I think most people who don’t need to hit a specific frame miss it. It has bitten us a lot of times (we make DVD’s too) but now all of our Final Cut users are trained in to this procedure. The Quicktime conversion output has always been buggy for us.
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios

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What are your final cut sequence settings though? NTSC will never look as good as the RGB you create in After Effects, Photoshop or even the “YUV” space that final cut supposedly works in (I have my doubts about this, I too have seen “clean” graphics get crunched on render, if the “working” space is truly YUV there should be no perceived loss).
10Bit or 8Bit Standard Definition will look much better than DV, but because of the reduced colour space it can never reproduce RGB graphics with the same sharp edges.
If it’s any consolation there is never any way to see the sharp RGB detail on a TV monitor, and in my experience stuff that looks terrible on the computer monitor can look OK on the TV (Conversely a lot of stuff that looks fine on the computer monitor looks terrible on the TV).
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios

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I think it’s more likely that you have a problem at the final cut pro end. What are your sequence settings? If you’re cutting in DV it might just be the DV codec destroying your nice graphics (it really looks like hell with nice sharp graphics). If you have After Effects on the mac you could import his render and then render it out to DV so it doesn’t render in Final Cut, that was you can rule the animator out of the equation and I have always found that after effects does a much better job of transcoding, especially if there is any scaling involved.
There are a couple of tutorials around on optimizing graphics for DV, I can’t find the main one I was thinking of right now but this one addresses the DV problem (https://www.creativecow.net/articles/hodgetts_philip/titles/index.html) , of course if you’re working SD or higher I’m completely off track, let me know.
Glenn Stewart
1k studios