Believe me I gotten my share of turd polishing requests! In this case however I have properly lit head shots (shot with the HVX) composited with text in After Effect, and rendered out as Animation Codec .mov files. Problem is the text after flv conversion looks much softer and a bit ragged compared to the source. I increased to bit rate to 3000 and maxed out the quality settings (as best as I understand), but the output was still sub-par.
Other than my being a novice, I think my expectations for Flash video are too high. Like everyone else, I assume H.264 integration into Flash will help these quality issues.