Scenarist Buffer Underflows

[pellegrino]

I'm trying desparately to create a DVD of old home movies for my parents' wedding anniversary on the 21st and I have two clips (out of around 20 total) that just will not multiplex in Scenarist. Each clip is about 10 minutes long and was transferred to Sony Digital 8 from film, then captured to my PC as AVI. I used TMPGenc 2.58.44.152 to encode the MPEG-2 video and scenarist's AC3 encoder for the audio. I've already tried increasing the VBV buffer size in TMPGenc as suggested in this forum with no better results. Does anyone else have any suggestions?

Error Video or Audio Buffer underflow: (Dts: 22254, SCR 22272)

Also, what do the DTS and SCR numbers refer to here? Does that give me some clue as to where the problem is happening? Are there any tools I can use to analyze the video and/or audio streams to find out where the problem is?

TIA...

Adam

[adam]

Usually this happens when your bitrate it too high. What max bitrate did you use in TMPGenc? From my experience, TMPGenc is extremely liberal with the bitrate and doesn't always respect the max you set. You may need to overcompensate.

Total combined bitrate (audio + video +subs) cannot exceed 10.08Mbits.

[SLK001]

You probably have some scenes that are extremely bright, which can cause an encoder to go ape. You can run your videos through BitRate Viewer and find out where this is occuring and either lower the bitrate, or apply some BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST compensation - or, cut those scenes out altogether.

[pellegrino]

Thanks for the tip on bitrate viewer. It reports just what I feared though, the peak bitrate is only 1024kbps, average is around 750. I'm doing half resolution and low bit rates to be able to fit more on. the disc. I know it won't look so hot, but they'll be able to see almost their entire collection of home movies on one disc.

Any other ideas? BTW, I've also tried encoding these clips using TMPGenc's two DVD presets with no better luck.

thanks,

adam