[Ron Dulin]

The quicktimes look fuzzy in any program — FCP, Quicktime, Pro Tools — but I have not checked them through an external display. Comparing the DV-NTSC quicktimes from FCP with the DV-NTSC quicktimes from Media Composer is enough to show that there is a (major) problem with the FCP outputs.

I think calling them fuzzy is flattering, to be honest. The TC burn-in is borderline unreadable. And I’ve checked all the obvious possibilities I can think of (quality is set to highest, etc).

For now I can just continue exporting from Media Composer, which works fine, but it would be nice to not be hogging the system doing the HD to SD compression on my primary workstation.

[Ron Dulin]

The “high quality” setting is enabled (I was very excited that you’d figured it out, and I thank you for the suggestion because I had not checked that previously). Unfortunately, that isn’t it.

I should point out another strange fact: If I convert the fuzzy-looking DV-NTSC quicktimes to any other codec, they go back to looking fine.

It’s probably something simple, but I am baffled.