Why do stills look so much better in Avid Xpress Pro?

This is due to display optimizations in FCP, which reduce displayed resolution to enable realtime playback in the Canvas. You should generally never rely on Canvas previews to assess quality, but should view a final rendering on the expected output device, such as a video monitor, or once it has been exported at final resolution.

John
http://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/

Dear John,

I find your postings knowledgeable and generally to the point but I must note that you should not post your website URL as part of your signature. The house rules read, quote, Do not post a URL unless it directly answers a user's question. If any portion of your Submission, including any posted URL, results in any accrual of compensation or benefit to you, then you must note this in your post by stating, "I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link", unquote.

Please respect this forum.

George

Besides advices above, try not using more pixels in your stills that necesary for your potential pan and/or zoom editing. Resize them i.e. in Photoshop before importing.
If you don't want any pan or zoom in your edot, resize your stills to just your timeline settings pixel dimension.

Just to back John up:

Shane's Stock Answer #2: Blurry playback

ONLY JUDGE THE QUALITY OF YOUR MATERIAL ON AN EXTERNAL NTSC MONITOR, OR AT LEAST A TV.

1. Disable overlays on the canvas
2. Make sure you've rendered everything (no green bars at the top of the timeline

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24787

Video playback requires large amounts of data and many computations. In order to maintain frame rate and be viewable at a normal size, only about one-fourth of the DV data is used in displaying the movie to the screen. However, the DV footage is still at full quality, and is best viewed thru a TV or NTSC monitor routed thru your camera or deck.

Shane

Dear George:

I disagree

John is posting or indicating his site is going to provide a solution to the poster.

It's just his site.

He makes no mention about going to the link as a solution.

best wishes

OK, thanks for the heads-up George. This is a common practice in many other forums (2-pop, Creative Cow, Cafe LA, etc., etc.), but I will refrain from doing so here unless it is part of a direct answer.

John