Quality Issues on Export

I'm having a heck of a time with this. I'm shooting with a Sanyo Xacti, whose native format is MP4 burned to an SD card. Since FCE won't handle these files directly, I'm transcoding to DVCPRO50 with MPEG Streamclip.
I bring these into FCE and everything works fine. But the export quality out of FCE is pretty awful, no matter what I do. I've tried about all the export options in all sizes. None of them are even close to the orginal MP4 quality. (They're shot in 640X480SHQ
If played in QuickTime, the DVCPRO conversions look terrific. iMovie seems to do a better job with these files.
Any suggestions?
Paul

Unfortunately, your example is still queued.
edit_
Format: MPEG2
Range: Entire Sequence
Preset: custom
Now, my question: is this your Project Preset, or more likely your Export setting? It appears that you are using the AVI (uncompressed from AE) as your source material. Is this correct? What is the Field Dominance of your Imported AVI? What is the Field Dominance of your Exported MPEG-2?
Your issue sounds like a Field Dominance/Order problem. Per the other question, you are in PAL-land, right?
If needed, you can run all files through G-Spot to get info on their Field Dominance/Order. This would be the first thing that I would look into. If you have, and all is fine, then ignore my comments. We'll just wait until your example makes it out of queue.
Good luck,
Hunt

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    Thanks.
    Ralph

    OK, I've been doing some more research and I think I found the problem.  The choppy picture is due to Premiere Elements and VLCs inability to properly de-interlace the 60i video.  It gets played back in 30p, which does not create horizontal lines, but it is a lot more choppy than the native 60i, especially when there is a lot of movement in the picture.
    I verified this theory by installing the latest VLC beta (from http://nightlies.videolan.org/) and playing back my source MTS file with De-Interlacing set to "On" and De-Interlacing Mode set to "yadif (2x)".  Those settings did not work with the current official relase of VLC (1.1.12).  The 1.2 VLC beta is not fully functional yet and I am not getting consistent results, but when I play that video several times, then after about 3 or 4 tries it plays back perfectly smooth, just like it is when playing back the native file from the camcorder connected to the HDTV via HDMI.
    That also works with video exported from Premiere Elements 10 with preset AVCHD M2T - H264 1920 x 1080i 30.
    The video is still choppy when played back in Premiere, but that does not really matter, since the output file produced by Premiere can be played back with VLC (assuming that the final build of VLC 1.2 can handle the files correctly).
    -> Hunt: thank you again for your help.
    Ralph

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