DV is compressed, 8-bit, 4:1:1 video. Since it's already compressed and color subsampled, there's no way to repair whatever "damage" that might have done to your image. The goal is to avoid any further damage.
When you load that DV footage into After Effects, it gets converted from 4:1:1 Y'CbCr data into 4:4:4 RGB data as the DV codec decompresses the data into After Effects' RGB buffers. So there is no need to do any intermediate step to expand the color space.
When you're doing the color correction within AE, you want a color space with as much resolution as possible, so that as you do minute adjustments to the data you minimze rounding error. That's why I suggested using a 16-bit project (16 bits for each of the red, green and blue channels). When working in an 8-bit project, if you use multiple filters, each filter needs to round to an 8-bit value, regardless of how accurate the filter is internally. By using a 16-bit project, you reduce that rounding error. As you apply multiple filters, this rounding can become quite visible if you're limited to 8 bits.
Color Finesse takes this a step further by using 32-bit floating point to represent each color channel, and by combining most of the color correction tools you'll need to use into one application so that there isn't the need to combine multiple filters with rounding between each filter.
So now that you have the beautifully corrected footage in a big 16-bit space, the trick is to deliver it to someone else. If you deliver in DV format, then you'll need to go through another DV compression cycle. And the person using your footage will also need to go through a DV decompression cycle, unless they happen to be using your footage unchanged and are using a DV system.
By using a very lightly compressed delivery method (such as JPEG @ 90%), you eliminate that additional DV compression and color subsampling step. But it really depends on how you want to deliver footage, your business model, etc., any of which may outweigh the quality issue.
Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture
