Editing Dilemma

Once all our footage had been collected, using Final Cut Express we began to edit our music video. We felt very happy with our editing, by the time our second draft was due we had a completed music video to hand into our teacher in order to get a grade and feedback. We went to save our piece and made sure we selected all the correct formats to save the video properly so we were able to upload a good quality video to YouTube.
However, once we had waited around an hour for the video to fully save we were not at all happy with the quality of our video. The footage was very pixelated and looked like it had almost been squashed like in the picture to the right. This was not the quality of footage we had expected when we recorded and edited.
We asked our teacher for help as we assumed we had just saved it in the wrong setting and that's why the quality came out so bad. However this wasn't the case and the issue was that the easy set up settings were wrong. Despite there being posters up in our classroom we failed to realise that before we started we had to have the video in the right set up settings. Additionally, this wasn't able to be changed after editing everything. Our teacher did a lot of research into any possible solutions that would save us starting again and re-editing our whole video and she knew how long we had already spent editing and getting it to the way we wanted. However after trying around 6 or 7 different solutions, the video was still coming out blurry and just wasn't the quality we wanted.
So in order to get full credit for the amount of work and effort we had put into filming and editing good quality footage, we decided the best solution would just be to start the editing again, this time making sure we were on the correct settings before we started.
The re-editing process didn't take too long second time around, we just took note of every video we had used originally and only uploaded them to final cut express and cut them to the same length and added any effects we had previously used, all together it took around 5 hours including rendering time. We felt this time was completely worth it as when we then saved it again the quality was so much better.
We didn't want to hand in a piece of work that we weren't completely satisfied with so were very relieved when the re-edit came out at a good quality and wasn't squashed like before.
Below is a montage of 6 versions of the opening using different settings in order to try and save the video as the best quality possible. However non of these testers where to the quality we wanted which is why we decided to start the editing again.