Ok, So I shot some footage (PF24) on the HV20 and did the following...

1) captured the footage in a 1080/60i time line
2) went to the captured scratch folder and removed the pulldown with JES
3) saved out a mov using AIC
4) dumped that mov back in the time line (looks fine)
5) edited the clip, added some text
6) exported a reference movie
7) dumped the reference clip into compressor
8) compressed an h.264 with at 960x540

the result is jaggy text and video... (see below)

here it is before - http://www.sacreativeservices.com/forum_stuff/ref_movie.png
here it is after - http://www.sacreativeservices.com/forum_stuff/h264_movie.png
here are my compressor settings - http://www.sacreativeservices.com/forum_stuff/compressor.png

If I export to compressor within FCP, I get another issue... the text is now stretched:

see for yourself - http://www.sacreativeservices.com/forum_stuff/h264_movie_infcp.png

What am I doing wrong??? I have been racking my brain for too long on this and have not come up with anything... please tell me I am doing something stupid...:P

I feel like I should be looking at the frame control menu, but I know when you touch things in that menu the render time can jump BIG TIME.

Thanks in advance,

Scott

I don't know if you've checked this, but if you're opening them up in Quicktime, check to see if the final output (your h.264) is set to High Quality... open it in quicktime, Open Movie Properties, select the video track and check the Visual Settings tab... See if turning on the "High Quality" checkbox on the bottom fixes your resolution.... if so, then it's just Quicktime ;)

Another issue might be the quality of the h.264 compression you're using... if you want more crisp output, you might have to bump up the quality settings or increase your "limit bandwidth" settings.

Thanks for the reply Kelly... after much trial and error last night, I did find the solution...

In compressor, I needed to change my frame control to "custom" and then set the resize filter to best.

See window - http://www.sacreativeservices.com/forum_stuff/frame_control_window.png

It did double the time it took to render... which is not a huge deal. It takes about 7 minutes to render 30 seconds of video.

It's still not "perfect", but its very acceptable...

here is a the crunched down version - http://www.sacreativeservices.com/forum_stuff/frame_control.png

This article at Apple may be helpful to you. It's titled "Final Cut Pro 6: 1080p24 workflow for Canon HV20 camcorder"

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306389

Yeah, I read that too... Unfortunately I do not have FCP 6 yet...