trouble exporting from final cut express to quicktime movie

[cqpa]

I have been using final cut express for about three months now (newbie). I create a movie, export it to quicktime (which usually is about a 20G .mov file) then bring it into iDVD to create DVDs. Then I use the Quicktime conversion to make videos to put onto the web (usually 30m to 200m size - still .mov format). This time when I finished editing the movie I went to export to Quicktime (NOT conversion at this point) and it creates a poor quality 1G .mov file. I can't see any places to change the settings to make the quality better. The original files are over 20G (three separate video files equally approx 20G). I created the movie, rendered everything, and saved it as usual. Could I have changed the settings at one point to hurt the quality?

I am using the following:

FCE 4.0.1
Mac OS X 10/5/7
MacBook Pro

Thank you.