DV NTSC to h264

Dusted off a project from 2006 after realizing I didn't have a good soft copy of the two videos. It's DV footage that I output my master copy as QuickTime DV NTSC. Copied these two files over to my Mac to use Final Cut to insert chapters and output for Apple TV and YouTube. Video looks good when I just open the files in QuickTime player and make full screen. However, the video looks very degraded in FCP. The time line in FCP is correct 720x480 (29.97i). The view is set to Optimized/Original. I output anyway SD for Apple TV and YouTube. Video looks horrible. I'm not really concerned with file size. The original DV NTSC is around 10GB and 8GB for the files. All that I'm concerned about is getting something that will look good on Apple TV and YouTube.

Any suggestions?

I think it's the deinterlacing that causes the problem. 

TMav wrote: ...It's DV footage that I output my master copy as QuickTime DV NTSC.... Video looks good when I just open the files in QuickTime player and make full screen. However, the video looks very degraded in FCP....I output anyway SD for Apple TV and YouTube. Video looks horrible....All that I'm concerned about is getting something that will look good on Apple TV and YouTube...

NTSC DV is interlaced. Quicktime Player de-interlaces upon playback. By default the FCPX viewer only shows every other interlaced field. You must use View>Show in Viewer>Both Fields. That will look better but its' *only* for playback. 

If the first clip added to the project is interlaced, that makes an interlaced project. By definition the export will also be interlaced and expect the playback chain to de-interlace. IOW the TV, the player, etc. Using Quicktime to evaluate quality of interlaced material often is misleading because it applies deinterlacing automatically based on metadata. If it guesses wrong the material doesn't look right.

It's better to use VLC for this since it has specific controls for deinterlace on/off and varous user-selectable deinterlace algorithms. The settings are Video>Deinterlace>On/Off/Auto, and Video>Deinterlace Mode>(multiple choices).

If you simply want the material to look good on Youtube, create a manual 720p project, add the DV clips, select them all, then in the Inspector "i" tab at the bottom select "settings" view, and select the deinterlace checkbox. This will hard-deinterlace the footage and the export should look OK. Evaluate the exported material using VLC with deinterlacing turned off.

Edit/add: since typical DV is 4:3 aspect ratio, dropping that into a 720p project will produced a "pillar boxed" frame. If you put a DV clip in an auto project, then do File>New Project and select "Custom Settings", FCP will then show you the available NTSD SD settings. This enables selecting a 720x480 DV 29.97p project, which you can then use the above procedure to hard deinterlace. The result should be similar to using a 720p project with deinterlacing but it will be 4:3 aspect ratio. Since most playback devices are 16:9, it may not make much difference since 4:3 material will be pillar boxed anyway. But you could try a test clip both ways, upload to Youtube and examine on various playback devices.

Youtube is also capable of deinterlacing -- IF the uploaded material is properly interlaced, and has correct metadata. However there's a lot of Youtube material which has "baked in" interlacing since the interlaced material was encoded to a progressive project without deinterlacing. Those artifacts are almost  impossible to remove.