Re-sizing problem - DVPAL for internet delivery

Question

I'm editing a package for internet delivery, the final pixel size will be 320 x 240. The stuff has not been filmed very well so it needs a 10% crop to cut out the nasties around the edge of the picture. I changed the settings of my sequence to 75% of the size of DV PAL (540x432) and resized my footage to 85% of the original. So I should have enough data available for the app not to have to interpolate new pixels (it should be like a simple size crop in photoshop). Before the render it looks fine. After I render, it looks terrible; like I've increased the size way beyond it's native resolution (which I think I was very careful not to do). Can anyone suggest where I have gone wrong here please?
Thanks a lot..

Answer 1

I resized in FCP because I need to crop the image. If I had kept the sequence settings at 720x576 then I would have increased the size of the picture by around 10% to get rid of the stuff around the edge of the picture that should never have been recorded. I know that doing that will result in a degraded image because I'm blowing it up beyond it's native resolution. But because I'm going to half the size of the thing for internet delivery later on anyway, I tried to blow it up and stay within it's natve resolution by decreasing the size settings of the sequence, then resized the picture making sure that I was actually decreasing rather than increasing it's size. So the image is decreased in size by 85% but the sequence is decreased in size by 75%, leaving me room to crop off the edges. It looks fine until I render it.. which is weird no?