Motion import to FCP looks awful

I have a Motion2 project I created that looks perfect in Motion. When I import into FCP 5, first I have to render it (is this normal?), and it looks awful afterward - the text looks very jagged and aliased, and the layered "background" animation is completely lost, leaving only black (see below).
The project settings on both are NTSC/DV at 720x480 and 29.97.
I'm using the animated curves layers from one of the templates in Motion2 as my background layer, but I wanted them darker, so I doubled them up and played with the blend modes. This is the animated "background" that's not showing up in FCP.
Man, I was riding high after creating a lower third for the same project in Motion that turned out beautiful (thanks to some helpful advice on this forum . When I did the import for the lower third piece into the very same FCP project it looks excellent! The only difference I can think of is that it had the video clip brought in from FCP that I animated over, whereas this project is a bumper that is all created in Motion.
Help - any thoughts???
All the best,
~Chris

OK, I'm closer to figuring it out and just hoping someone can help me take it to the finish line
The only difference between the two Motion files is the lower third was created over video sent from FCP. Since this Motion project (the one I'm having a problem with) is a bumper on its own in the FCP Timeline, I thought maybe there's a problem with the "black" FCP creates in any spaces in the timeline, and this is perhaps adding black to the background of the Motion file import...
Sure enough, I built an NTSC black b.g. still in Photoshop and imported it into Motion. Putting this black NTSC b.g. on the bottom layer recreated the EXACT problem I'm having in FCP! On this NTSC b.g. layer, I can take down the opacity all the way, or choose "stencil alpha" from the blend modes to get the right look, but either way, when I import it back into FCP I still get the same problem.
So, I tried importing the black NTSC still into FCP, sending it to Motion, adding the Motion file to the top, and still get the same problem upon reimporting...I'm out of ideas at the moment...
Can anyone think of a workaround? Patrick?
Regards,
~Chris

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