Digital Aritfacts/Hits

I have created a DVD for my client and each time I burn a DVD (before making the CMF) for his approval, there always occurs "digital hits" in the video. I do not see these hits during the DVD Studio Pro Simlutation. Nor do I see these hits when playing the compressed MPEG2 videos.

I compressed my video in the Compressor Preset 90 min, 2 pass. The hits do not occur at the same time code in different copies nor in different burn/format versions. So I am wondering what the issues might be. My thought is that the burn speed of the disk is too high (up to 6x rather than 2x) or maybe to high a compression (6.2mbs). The total video run time is 97 minutes and compresses to about 6 Gb.

Are there any settings in the burn/format that may be funky?

The video quality looks awesome but I can make a custom setting. Oh, I also compress before importing to DVD Studio Pro. I know there are several takes on when to run compression but I do not know if that really effects the final output.

Thanks in advance.

Doug

Speed of burn is a very likely candidate, as is the audio bit rate. Did you compress the audio to AC3? If not, then you have a 6Mbps video file with a 1.5Mbps audio file going through a player on a writeable disc... this represents a fairly high overall bitrate, and you'd be better off compressing the audio to AC3 to reduce it.

As a rule of thumb, when using recordable media, keep the overall bit rate down to no more than about 7.4Mbps. Use AC3 audio, don't add labels and you should be about right... oh, and write it at a slower rate if you can!