Sony Vegas picks another bitrate?

[Abas-Avara]

Whats wrong with Sony Vegas?

I have a 3 hour video which needs to fit in one DVD. I calculated everything with Avidemux and came with the results 2,9 MB/s video and 192 kb/s audio.
So I rendered it to MPEG2 with cbr 2,9 MB/s video and cbr 192 kb/s audio.
With this settings it should fit in one DVD, however the result was 5,15 GB.
I looked with mediainfo and the video bitrate was 3,7 MB/s !

I spended the whole evening rendering that video, and this are the results. 2 questions:
Why?
How can I force it to have a certain bitrate?

I use Sony Vegas 10 btw

[aedipuss]

did you use constant bit rate and no audio(make ac-3 audio separately)? i can't say vegas has ever been off by more than a 100kbps in the hundreds of renders i've done with it.

[davexnet]

What is the benefit to using Vegas to produce a DVD compliant mpeg-2.
Wouldn't it be better to save to an intermediate file and render two-pass with HCenc?

At such a low bitrate, surely 2-pass will produce superior results.

[budwzr]

What is the benefit to using Vegas to produce a DVD compliant mpeg-2.

To prevent possible re-encoding by the authoring software. Vegas does not author DVD's.

[davexnet]

What is the benefit to using Vegas to produce a DVD compliant mpeg-2.

To prevent possible re-encoding by the authoring software. Vegas does not author DVD's.

Does Vegas produce an mpeg-2 that is trusted to be more compliant than HCenc for example?
Or am I misunderstanding your point?

[chowmein]

Yes you could render to lossless avi and plug it into HCenc, but why bother, just use Vegas's mainconcept encoder which is just as good.

[Abas-Avara]

Yes, the MPEg2 results from Vegas were always good. But if I can't solve this, I will use HCenc.

did you use constant bit rate and no audio(make ac-3 audio separately)? i can't say vegas has ever been off by more than a 100kbps in the hundreds of renders i've done with it.

Yes, I had put constant bitrate to 2,9 MB/s. And audio is MPEG layer 2 192 kb/s

Today I tried to use variable bitrate, because Vegas ignored the cbr.
And I got same results, 3,7 MB/s, while I put max 2,9Mb/s and average 2,5 MB/s on video settings.

I use the DVD PAL template, but with my own bitrates.
Is this a bug? I will try then HCenc or on older Vegas version.

[aedipuss]

can you post what mediainfo says about your source and rendered videos? it's free and easy enough to use. put it in text mode and copy/paste the entire results here for both.

[Abas-Avara]

The original source file is DV avi. These are the details of MPEG2 exported file

General
Complete name : C:\Users\-\Desktop\Back to School.mpg
Format : MPEG-PS
File size : 4.85 GiB
Duration : 3h 4mn
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 3 758 Kbps

Video
ID : 224 (0xE0)
Format : MPEG Video
Format version : Version 2
Format profile : Main@Main
Format settings, BVOP : Yes
Format settings, Matrix : Default
Duration : 3h 4mn
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 3 491 Kbps
Maximum bit rate : 2 900 Kbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 576 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate : 25.000 fps
Standard : PAL
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Interlaced
Scan order : Bottom Field First
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.337
Stream size : 4.51 GiB (93%)

Audio
ID : 192 (0xC0)
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 2
Duration : 3h 4mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 192 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 254 MiB (5%)

Menu

[aedipuss]

something's not right with your vegas mpeg encoder. you might try uninstalling and reinstalling vegas. i did 8 dvd spec mpeg-2 encodes with a setting of average 4200 max 9500 for a recent project and the most one was off came in at 4205.

General
Complete name : W:\vegas\YMCA_JUNE_2012_tape2a_merged_cut.m2v
Format : MPEG Video
Format version : Version 2
File size : 783 MiB
Duration : 26mn 2s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 4 205 Kbps

Video
Format : MPEG Video
Format version : Version 2
Format profile : Main@Main
Format settings, BVOP : Yes
Format settings, Matrix : Default
Format settings, GOP : M=3, N=15
Duration : 26mn 2s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 4 205 Kbps
Maximum bit rate : 9 500 Kbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Standard : NTSC
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Interlaced
Scan order : Bottom Field First
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.406
Stream size : 783 MiB (100%)

[Abas-Avara]

I was using Vegas 10 for the first time. But I will install Vegas 9 again and see if it helps. I will post here again whether it works or not.

[aedipuss]

i use pro11 here, 10 never thrilled me, 9 was ok. i used 6 for the longest time. if you can get it 11 works nicely.

[Abas-Avara]

Well thanks guys. I thought I was doing something wrong, but it was a bug with Sony Vegas 10

I installed back Sony Vegas 9 and so far it seems fine. Even though rendering is at 57%, Mediainfo shows 2,9 MB/s

[budwzr]

There was an update that fixed that. Apparently yours is bootleg. You don't want to update it. Hahaha. There's no way a registered Vegas user would not receive a notification of available updates. I know, I've been a Vegas user for years.

If that were a trial you're using, it would be the latest build. Hahahaha. Busted.

[Abas-Avara]

^ haha you got that right