[Erik Pagan] “(In Compressor i changed all the frame controls to Best and changed the closed GOP to open. Settings were also set to progressive and 23.98 fps.) “
That is a waste of time you are not doing anything that needs Frames ON. You have progressive material at 24p, just encode it as such.
[Erik Pagan] “I’m assuming, HD cables (blue, green and red) it looks great with none of the artifacts or issues.” They are NOT HD cables, they are analog component cables, that can send either SD or HD and in your case it is SD. But they will indeed look better, they are sending a lot more color information. Makes a huge difference.
Best quality with HDV footage is to send the HDV sequence to Compressor from within FCP. This takes a lot longer to encode and it will tie up FCP and Compressor for the entire time but it should look a lot better. If your movie is under 90 minutes I would use a CBR encode.