I've just come up against a rather frustrating issue. A company I am doing work for has a white logo on a bright red background that has to appear at the head and tail of the video. The big problem is that this is causing havoc when it is encoded into Flash video at a size reduced for the web. The blockiness due to the low chroma sampling is horrendous.

But there is little I can do about it because it is the companys' strong corporate colour scheme. Any suggestions as to what to do? I'm trying a gaussian blur to see if that smooths things out. I noticed that Quicktime X on the Mac applies chroma smoothing by default to the file that is playing back. But VLC and online website players such as Flowplayer do not.

This is a client who isn't going to accept "video can't display red properly" as an excuse!

First thing I'd try is separating the Red element and applying a "glow" type black or dark color drop shadow - that would keep the red and white from interacting so badly.

(also add a bit of separation and make the logo seem more contemporary.)

YMMV.