Pixelated reds in MPEG-2 (and most other) exports

Question

This is a revisitation of an issue I identified over a year ago and I still don't have a resolution. I am going to cross-post this to the Quicktime forum as well as that of FotoMagicko. I would do so at Photo-to-Movie as well if they only had such a resource. I am desperate for new ideas or techniques to try. I would be pleased to no end to be told of a simple error in my process, but I'm beginning to suspect that Quicktime is broken.
The original and still biggest problem is heavily pixelated reds in MPEG-2 movies. Turns out it exists in most other QT formats as well.
I'll step you through the workflow and then discuss observations gleaned from a number of experiments:
We start with hi-res photos and render them as motion slideshows. We have done this in iPhoto, FotoMagiko and Photo-to-Movie all with the same results. All of these applications utilize quicktime as their rendering engine and so are really irrelevant as a possible source of the problem (as will be verified later). QT does not support export directly to MPEG-2 and so an intermediary file format is required. More on this later.
The rendered QT file is then dropped into Compressor and rendered as 2-pass 8 Mbit max VBR (have also tried 8 Mbit CBR with no improvement). The resulting MPEG-2 is then imported into DVDSP4 for authoring.
The resulting DVDs all show heavy pixelation in reds.
Well the problem is out of gamut reds in your source files, obviously I hear you say.
OK, so back to the beggining - this time run all images through Photoshop's NTSC Colors filter and rerun. Same problem. Have also done this AND converted to NTSC color space - no joy. I have even ASSIGNED the NTSC color space to the image instead of converting - this munged up the colors to know end, but also did not fix the problem.
Well, maybe MPEG-2 is just not capable of handling even all of NTSC's colors, right?
Seems unlikely, but maybe. What about this then - of all of the Quicktime codecs to which to export the slideshow movie, only 1 of them produces an intermediary file that does not ALSO show the pixelated reds - the Animation codec (not Apple Intermediate, not Component, not MPEG-4, not eve Uncompressed at either 8 OR 10 bit!). Again, these are with source images whose gamut has ostensibly been reigned in to legal colors via Photoshop.
Well at least there's ONE intermediate that produces a flawless export - just use that
Ok, except that once Compressor is done with it (and I've tried every reasonable combination of parameters), the pixelation is back.
I've seen broadcast video showing these colors (or a representation of them) without this kind of artifact - how is it accomplished? About the only thing I havn't tried is importing it into Final Cut and trying to figure out their chromometer thingy. How would this differ from the NTSC Colors filter in Photoshop. That still wouldn't explain what appears to be a problem with the majority of Quicktime's codecs with saturated reds...
Any help, advice, or even guesses are appreciated.

Answer 1

The internet, as always. is your friend:
http://www.google.com/search?q=4:2:24:1:14:2:0&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
The 1st and second links are pretty useful. It describes how chroma (colour) is stored a lower resolution to luminance (black and white) to save space. Photos don't employ this type of colour compression, which is why they look so different when out in a video codec.
By going via NTSC DV, which is 4:1:1, to DVD MPEG2 which is 4:2:0, you end with a combination of the worst aspects of each, namely 4:1:0, which is why the MPEGS look so bad. However, you will always be limited to some chroma down-sampling with most codecs.
Bringing the photos into FCP will give you more control - but will probably be a royal pain to get them to do what you want - I would exhaust all possibilities with the packages you are already using.
What is your final out put (sorry - I skimmed you post) - DVD ? Have you exported to that and seen how it looks ? It might be okay.