I'm getting frustrated. I am trying to export a video out for the web, and would like to use h.264 encoding. Problem is I lose a ton of saturation when I do so.

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c4/jkolada/Picture1-5.jpg

Is this caused by the h.264 codec or am I doing something wrong when I'm exporting? And i'm sure you all know better than me, but what are the best settings for web that will retain the picture quality and color but not be a massive file?

One question. Are you on a Mac?

It looks to me like a black/white level issue. This can make the colors look unsaturated. What are you using to compress it? It looks to me like the compression program is taking a Quicktime movie with black levels at 16 (and white at 235 - normal for professional video files) straight and converting it to an MP4 with black levels also at 16. For non-professional formats, black should be at 0, white at 255. Good compression programs do this translation automatically. If your compression program has a Contrast filter, you could increase contrast to get the black(and white) levels correct.

Perrone, yes I am on a mac, using FCP.
Thanks Brett, I'll look into that and see what I can figure out.