I found a great article over at Genius DV about sequence settings in Final Cut Pro and how that affects export quality:

Have you ever noticed that when working in Final Cut Pro with DV media, graphics and titles often have a poor quality look? There are two major reasons for this.

#1 DV media uses a 4:1:1 color space

#2 DV media is compressed, roughly 5:1

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They go on to talk about changing your sequence settings to something higher quality, like Animation codec. I would add that the DV-NTSC setting not only smashes down your color space because of its codec, but also lessens the quality of your text & graphics because of interlacing. If you are never going to show your video on a standard television / DVD, I would skip the DV-NTSC codec entirely. This is one of the secrets to great-looking web videos and screencasts.

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