IMovie back to VHS: Broadcast quality? Need quick answer

I have a short film that can very well see television broadcast in the next few weeks.
I need to know what is the absolute best quality compression settings for this.
It has to be 720x480 (NTSC). Can I get away with just about any setting (I primarily used a 720x480 Quicktime setting, it's gotten the best resolution), and have it come out virtually the same quality as seen on a desktop?
The other problem is I worked on it in an 720 HD setting by mistake, so now there's black borders. Can I copy/paste the work into another project with only the frame size changed?

+So explain this to me: why does the .264 setting look way better than a NTSC or just about any other resolution on my screen? I'm inclined to think that given the proper frame rate (29.97) set, .264's resolution is going to look like gangbusters on a video tape.+
Video tape and television work very different than your computer screen, and you cannot use your computer screen to judge how well a video would look when played back on television. For starters, TV is interlaced video, but a computer screen is progressive scan, and so is H.264. To get a H.264 onto television, it has to be converted into interlaced video. You'll have a quality loss right in that step.
Do you have a DV camcorder? Export your video to DV, then hook it up to your television, and watch it there. Then start a new iMovie DV project, import your H.264 clip, export it to DV, and compare. If you provide a H.264 clip, it has to go through a similar conversion at the TV station before being broadcast.
You mentioned you accidentally started in 720p. If you really care about optimum results, I would start all over, with a DV project. By going 720p, you introduced two extra conversion steps into the process: importing and converting your source material into 720p format with black side bars, then cropping back to 4:3 and exporting to DV format. Every time you go through a conversion like that, you loose a little bit of quality.

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