Major color/saturation issues in dvd authoring

Question

hi. we've just finished color correction for our indie film, and looking at the digi-beta master on a pro-ntsc monitor- it looks great. but, the dvd's look terrible. there has been a lot of yellow added to warm up the picture. so on the master, the yellow is subtle and applied to the backgrounds, on the dvd, the yellow is awful and everywhere. for example, on a close up of our lead, his skin is so freakishly yellow he looks like an oompa-loompa- not the look we're going for. here's the other kicker- when played on a computer with an LCD monitor, the dvd's look great- like the master. but i've played the dvd's on 4 different television, with 4 different dvd players, and they all look like crap. does anyone know how to solve this color issue in dvd studio pro? we cut the project in FCP. color was final touch, brought back into FCP. quick time exported from FCP, 10 bit uncompressed, 23.98 non-drop frame. then dvd studio pro used to do the authoring. all dvd studio pro settings are at default. THX!

Answer 1

So you used DVDSP to do the encoding as well as the authoring??
Have you tried taking a short-ish section of the footage and encoding it wiht something a good deal better, such as BitVice, MegaPEX or Canopus Procoder or Cinemacraft? These will give you much, much better quality encodes and you simply author the project with the MPEG file as an asset instead of the uncompressed file. If you use a short section you can get a better estimation of what is happening before you go for the full encode.
I realise these encoders are not free, but if you are serious about what you are doing then you'll need to invest in something that is purpose built for the job! The above range from not very expensive to moderate... and Cinemacraft goes into the high end price bracket depending on the version you opt for.