compressor is NOT giving me the bitrate i want!

hey everybody -

here's a conundrum for you:

i'm exporting a concert video (it's a self-contained movie), which is 84 minutes long, into MPEG-2, for authoring in DVDSP2.

Anyway, I opened up Compressor, imported the clip, and created my own custom setting, based on the "90-minute high quality encode."

Here's the problem:

I chose 7.4 Mbps as my average bitrate, with 8.8 being the peak. That should have given me a file of around 4.5 GB in size - however, my file ended up being 2.9 GB in size. And, when I opened it up in quicktime, it said that my data rate was 4.9 Mbps!

Now, before anybody says that my data rate was too high, let me tell you that I plan on authoring these to DVD-9's, which will hold my data. Plus, this video is a concert video, with lots of movement and high-contrast lighting - so I want to take full advantage of the DVD-9's space and encode my video at a high rate. PLUS, a recent rock concert DVD - "The Cure's Trilogy" - was encoded at 7.2 Mbps (that's what I'm loosely basing my custom-made preset upon).

And, motion estimation was set to "best."

The rest of my preset's settings were pretty standard - I added noise reduction and edge sharpening, as well as deinterlacing (blur). Plus, I checked the boxes for "add DVDSP meta-data" and "include chapter markers."

Does anybody know why Compressor lowered my bitrate?

thanks!

-ken

Did you save your settings? I had the same problem. I made a custom setting also based on the high quality 60 minute encode. The settings didn't get saved. Open your presets window and re-check the custom settings that you made and make sure they are indeed saved.

Open the preset, make the changes then close the presets window. It will prompt you to save or copy the preset.

thanks for the reply -

the changes i made for the higher bit rate ARE actually saved and were applied to the video clips - so i'm still confounded by it...