Final Cut Pro X make my images and video in lower quality

Try placing the clips that go soft in a compound clip. If you have any effects (or transforms) you are applying to the clips, apply those to the compound clip and not the original media.

Does that help?

As I said before, it should work fine. A few visual examples might help us better understand what is going wrong, and maybe progress towards a solution.

If you are using some third party effects, that is something that is worth look at - maybe there are some that need to be updated.

Also, in case there is some problem with other third party software, which could affect the way FCP works: Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

You can get Etrecheck from its website, but in the present case I think that you probably should edit in 4K.

Make a test: duplicate one 1080 project, open the copy in the timeline, then press Command-J to open the Project Inspector; click Modify, and change the frame size to 4K. Export as H264, and view that in your large screen TV. How do they compare?

It is one thing to make a project for youtube, where most viewers will never see the greatest possible quality. But if you are targetting 4K TV, and your material is 4K or larger, then by all means edit in 4K.

The suggestion Luis provides in using a 4K Timeline is my first option in your case.

Regards Exports:

Have you considered using the Apple App called Compressor?

It works in concert with FCPro to a large degree when controlling your Exports.

FCPro has "canned" options that cannot be altered.

Compressor allows fine tuning of the file to gain the best quality and the lowest file size.

This juggling of the file is an art that needs to be understood to get the best results.

Read the manual before proceeding.

Al

Can you post a screen shot of the Export/Share Settings window please?

It looks like this:

Al

It's probably more noticeable in this image than most because it so highly complex and difficult to encode, very small objects, probably moving in the wind, about the hardest thing for video to compress well. The only thing that would make it more difficult would be if it was red.

H.264 is a heavily compressed codec and will reduce the quality of the image further. Try a short section to see what it looks like.

I think that the problem is in the opposite direction. You are upscaling the 1080 content to view on a large 4K monitor.

When you upscale, the system has to either quadruple every pixel or make up pixels that weren't there. Now in many cases, depending on the screen, and the viewing distance, the result can be quite acceptable.

It is clear that this is not the case for you - hence my suggestion that you stick with 4K.

Video always takes up a lot of space, but in most cases the bulk of it is made of render files and optimized files. You can throw these away. In fact, you should not need to create any optimized media, or proxy media; and if you turn off "background render" you will also create a lot less render files.

A 4K H264 file is typically much smaller than a 1080 ProRes file. And if you can go with HEVC, you can have even smaller files (that is, if your TV supports HEVC; many don't, at least for now).

Photoshop is for still images. You absolutely cannot compare stills and video. Most cameras shoot using codecs that capture groups of pictures; only the first frame in the GOP is a complete frame, the subsequent 14 frames usually are dependent on calculations of changes between the frames done in real time as the shots are recorded. Your images are extremely difficult to encode and will show more loss when they are compressed in editing. I don’t think your expectations of what can be achieved at lower resolutions is realistic, especially with heavily compressed codecs that cameras often use.

Also it may help if you post some screenshots illustrating the problem with quality loss.

And also: which effects, specifically?

By reducing the image size you've reduced the resolution. That's why a 4K image, Ultra High Definition, is higher resolution and higher quality than an HD image.

That huge size is due to exporting as ProRes. You can export at H264 with much smaller size.

That said there is definitely something amiss. You should be able to use 4K material in a 1080 timeline without much trouble, the quality should be pretty good.