how to compress primary colors well?

[seannyb]

I'm trying to compress a video that uses a custom color palette... mostly deep blue. What happens is the deep blue parts are extremely pixelated and well, overall ugly. I can't prevent this without making a really oversized encode

Nandub SBC failed, even with the bitrate way up there, and the quality control ("min quality") at a very high setting. I get an oversized ugly mess.

so I used MPEG-1. Cinema Craft Encoder and TMPGENC produced the same results. In the end, the best I could do is a 110mb file (video duration of 3:30) with TMPGENC using "auto VBR: constant quality" at 75 (min/max bitrate: 900/4050). The video is really hyperactive, but the filesize still sounds a bit too large

the video is 720x480. Any lower than that would make the pixelation really noticable. Make the bitrate any smaller than that, and the detail loss is unacceptable. The only thing that helped a little is blurring the video a tiny bit, which let me reduce the bitrate and filesize by 20 megs (unnoticable after encoding, because the blue parts get pixelated anyway)

so am I stuck with some MPEG curse? Or is there some magic method or codec out there that can compress deep primary colors without oversized results?

[LordDethstar]

That has to do with the fact that most (all?) codecs store the chrominance (color) information at half the resolution as the luminance (brightness) information. To my knowledge there is nothing that can be done (except storing the Video as RGB24 :D)

[theReal]

Maybe it looks better in the end if you run it through a filter.
Most DV editing programs have a filter for tv color-scale, this is to prevent "bleeding" of primary colors (especially red) on tv screens.
I'm not sure if there's anything like this in VDub.