Hi I'm not sure what I'm missing here. Never had these problems until I got a new machine last week. Now when I compress a video when it comes out the other side it looks like the life got sucked out of it. File sizes are still great, artifacts are completely manageable. But the color? It's like there's no color left..

From and to: FCP6 - Compressor - Quicktime 7 compatible - H.264 800Kbps - no filters (because I never used them before and always got beautiful color).

Here are two screen grabs of the differences I am (suddenly) experiencing.

Go into quicktime's preferences, do you have "enable final cut color compatibility" checked? (you need to have FCP6 on your machine for this option)
Also export a still from the quicktime video, how do the colors compare? What I'm getting at is that what quicktime displays is not accurate. I would even try bringing it into final cut to compare. There was another thread about this and someone said the video looks fine when played on the internet, even though it is quicktime playing it. Your video may not be ruined, you're just not allowed to watch it correctly!

Thanks Aric. Until your post I had been opening the compressed video in quicktime, going to the window/show movie properties/video track/ then switching the transparency setting from "none (allow dithering) to "composition". This got the colors back on track perfectly well but I had to save each video IN quicktime, or I would have been SOL next time I viewed it. It also got the subsequent videos to play a little jittery. Maybe this suggestion from you will just change a setting in my quicktime player which will work for all the movies - instead of only the ones I change/save.

thanks