Raw footage looks great on monitor. But when I encode it (both compressor and adobe media encoder) and play it on a streamer (WD Live) to a HDTV LED, it looks terrible. Garish, over-saturated. Weird thing is that I have downloaded commerical film, and my edit looks the same as they do on the monitor, yet they play back right, while mine is horrible?
Sounds like colour space mismatch.
Try rendering to rec.709
Its going to be a combination of many things in your display set up and player.
Sounds like your computet monitor is way out of wack gamma wise so you are driving up colour values to get anything like what you want where as a commercial film will be mastered on accurate calibrated displays.
You can also bet your TV is out as well.
Really you need to calibrate your displays this will confirm many things in your set up like DVI and HDMI levels and colourspace handling, expected levels ranges, whether your player is messing with it to.
Invest £160 on an xrite i1 Display Pro probe or borrow one if you can, then usr HCFR and Dispcalgui both free to sort it all out. Plus patience and a bit of reading up.
Thanks for the advice. The weird thing is that I've been editing films since the '90's including alot of broadcast work. HDTV and monitors have always had a difference, but this is nutz.