I shot a small project with a Sony EX-1 and used FCP for editing. Output to an MPEG-4 files and viewed in Quicktime shows me color & contrast that matches my monitor in FCP. However, once the data has been processed through Compressor into an SD-DVD format the colors are muted and the contrast is dull. Even if I increase the data rate in Compressor, the colors are still muted.

In another example, I output to H.264 QT format and the gamma/contrast is lower. Even with the QT preference to match FCP gamma turned "on", the results are not as rich as the MPEG-4 format. What gives?

What compression procedures are there that retain the original color and gamma?

A few hours spent in the manual doesn't touch the subject and it's very disappointing.

What I do for h.264 is add a little bit of saturation and add a sharpening filter. It gives me pretty good results. For the SD DVD there are so many factors. Do you have a preview monitor connected to your computer? If not now you know what every real editing suite has one, it is because computers monitors are no good at giving you an idea of what your sequence will look like on a TV especially an SD tv. For the DVD I would recommend doing some minor color corrections and making another dvd to see how that looks.