"Broadcast quality" is a concept mostly used in advertising. The trick is that each and every broadcaster might define his own understanding of "broadcast quality" as a standard. If you want to be on the safe side with your content, you really have to widen your horizon and take a look at more or less the whole world.
What will the outlets for your film be? TV? In which countries? DVD? Cinema? Cell phone? There are technical requirements for each of these, and there are more (and more restrictive) requirements from the companies you have to deal with.
There's at least one company which traditionally marks the High End of broadcast technology,
http://www.quantel.com/. Have a look at their technical specifications (and their price tags), and you know at which level one
could play. Fortunately they are interested in spreading knowledge, so they publish their Digital Factbook for free
http://www.quantel.com/site/en.nsf/html/library_dfb. It's one of the best sources of in-depth technical information about all kinds of video signals and digital imageing.
But you don't have to play in this league (most of us aren't able to do so, including myself). You already have all the means and tools to produce high quality content. It's just knowledge which is needed to retain this level of quality.
1. AnimeStudio is able to produce high quality output. It would be possible to render films in dimensions as big as 8000 x 4000 px - but none of us owns the hardware which is able to handle those ridiculously big file sizes. Not even George Lucas or Steven Spielberg do that - the equipment necessary to handle such amount of data simply doesn't exist. If the latest Star Wars films were recorded in HDTV, then it's good enough for me.
2. So let's take HDTV (1920 x 1080 px, 25 fps/p) as our top border of quality - it is already a de facto standard in film industry (even although Quantel propagates this ... ). I can handle playback and file sizes of HDTV on my G5 at home. Maybe I can't edit it, but I could buy Final Cut HD if necessary. But I don't need to. I could as well have a smaller copy of all files (each scene as a seperate Quicktime movie) and edit this in iMovie ... not very comfortable, but possible. In fact I have purchased Final Cut HD Express - smaller version, but good enough for me, I can use multiple audio and video tracks, so I'm able to do the final edit and all the sound mix.
3. Once I have a final cut, I would hand over all my files and the EDL to some specialized digital video studio which repeats my edit with the HDTV material and delivers an HDTV master file. A studio like this must be able to convert this master file into one version for NTSC (reduced colours, 30 fps), one for PAL, one for DVD and whatever. Becaue I pay for this service, I can expect them to know about all the technical requirements for each format.
4. The master file could be used to transfer my film onto 35mm. This job will be done by another specialist. Because analog film stock has different colours than video, a colour timer will do the fine adjustment of colours with each shot of my film. That's his job, and I pay for his expertise. If I decide I need Dolby Surround sound I take my final cut project and hand it over to another expert who adjusts my mix to the requirements of 5.1.
It's mostly all a matter of knowing which part of the job is best left to people with specialized knowledge and better equipment.
Of course I still have to do my very best on my own part. I will choose colours which are harmonic and tasteful. I will render all my files in a codec with no compression, and I will have at least two backup discs full of Quicktimes and the same scenes as TIFF sequences, just to be sure.
It is common practice to pre-render parts of a scene and incorporate the video file again. AS does this gracefully, even in HDTV.
If the colours look good on as many different displays as you can test it at, then they're good enough for output on film - that's my experience. It is much more important that colours relate to each other in a shot than to meet some abstract numbers defined somewhere. Transfer to video mostly is a process of reducing the colour range, this is something I recommend not to do yourself. Don't worry too much about your local brand of TV broadcast system. Remember that content is produced everywhere in the world and sold all over the world. Do you think a european producer worries about NTSC-safe colours? Or that american broadcasters at a european film market would ask "Yeah, but how would that look in NTSC?". They know that there are specialized studios out there who do all that necessary conversion in high quality.
In-jokes in the background have always been readable in 35mm film, so that's nothing new. They are a holy tradition, so put them in! *g*
