PPro cs6 adjustment layer color tint

Question

I've been working on a project that uses an adjustment layer to apply some secondary color corrections using PPro's Three Way Color Corrector effect. I used just two -- one for a particular shade of red-orange (it's a plastic mixing bowl), and one for a narrow range of blues used in some product packaging (they were fluorescing under the fluorescent lights in a class room). Both of these corrections are narrow (small range of hues and saturations, and a somewhat larger range of luninance values), and the action is simply to lower the saturation to get these specific colors down to broadcast safe levels (as seen on PPro's vectorscope). Since these colors show up quite often in the video footage, and are quite isolated from all the other colors in the scene, I applied them to the whole video using an adjustment layer. Which is one of the intended uses of adjustment layers, yes? And it works beautifully, as expected.
So far so good. I look at this on my monitor, and it looks fine. I take my laptop to a plasma HDTV and look at it there, and it's spot on.
Then I used dynamic link to send the project to Encore for DVD output. I worked on menus for a while, and didn't pay much attention to the footage since I had (more or less) edit lock. When I sat down to actually watch one of the more or less complete DVDs, I noticed that the color wasn't right. It was darker and greener than I remembered (this on that same plasma screen HDTV). So I dragged the laptop back, and sure enough, it's darker and greener now.
To shorten the story, turns out the adjustment layer was the cause. I could turn it on and off using the little eyeball thingie on the timeline, and the adjustment layer is now effecting the entire image and not just the narrow range of reds and blues that are in the secondary color corrections. So I saved the two secondary color corrections as a preset and deleted the adjustment layer. Then I created a new adjustment layer and applied that preset. Boom, problem gone. No more green tint. The same secondary colors as before are under control. What's up with that?
Now, I can't reproduce it (or I'd attach some images for y'all to look at). But I saw it go by. And I've seen a couple of references to something similar to this in searching the 'net for more information. But only a couple.
So... Anyone seen anything like that? Or am I just halucinating again? If you've seen it or heard about it, what was the cause? And did it have anything to do with Encore?
Win7 fully patched
Production Premium cs6 fully patched
Project using PPro, AE, Audition, Photoshop, and Encore, mostly by dynamic linking.
Bruce Watson

Answer 1

There is a very common misstatement and misunderstanding of how adjustment layers work, which I'll repeat here: "Applying an effect to an adjustment layer applies the effect to all layers under the adjustment layer."
That's wrong in a subtle but important way.
What actually happens is that applying an effect to an adjustment layer applies the effect to the composited result from all of the layers under the adjustment layer.
This is an important distinction, because it puts the adjustment at a different place in the order of operations in the rendering pipeline.
Anyway, that's a long and perhaps overly theoretical way of saying that, yes, you may see some difference between applying an effect directly to a bunch of clips compared with applying the effect to an adjustment layer over that same bunch of clips.