Premiere: Letterboxed Slideshow exceeds bitrate..how to fix?

[dahmooser]

I've just spent the better part of the past couple of weeks scanning in just about every image from our wedding.

Each scan is scaled to 720 x 480 and saved as a BMP.
Some fill the entire screen, others, such as portrait images have black on the left and right.

I waited 5 hours for premiere to export the entire DVD stream as an .m2v. I used the MPEG encoder in premiere and set it to a maximum bitrate of 8000 kps, which I have read is considerable below the 9800 kps limit.

Now, when I compile the DVD in Maestro, it fails during the compile of the slideshow because the maximum bitrate was exceeded. I looked at the graphs of bitrate in Maestro and the images that are full screen jungle seem to make the bitrate go too high, which makes sense, since those are the most difficult to compress.

Question: how can I fix the exporting of the slideshow so that I don't exceed the bitrate again (and waste 5 hours!)? ideas? I thought I was safe the first time, but apparently not.

HELP! I am confused.

Thanks in advance!

[wwaag]

dahmooser,

Have not used Maestro, but it sounds like you've got a header problem. Download Restream (see tools) to check out the reported bit-rate in the header. Try lowering it to say 6000 and try again (Restream only changes the header information and makes a copy of the original m2v file). I've had the same problem with CCE since it always reports the bit-rate at 9800 on vbr encoding even if the actual bit-rate is only 5000. I use Tempgenc DVD Author where it reports the "error", although you can ignore it and it works fine. Hopefully this header "fix" will work for Maestro. If not, try another authoring program--even Ifoedit, its free, and works well. Using one that requires you to lower the quality of your input doesn't sound the best to me. Hope this helps.

wwaag

[mazinz]

you can also try the dvdpatcher program which "tricks' apps into thinking the m2v, mpg streams are different bitrates then they are. Takes less then a minute to use

[dahmooser]

Thanks for the responses. My solution was to download a new encoder from the Adobe Site AND set my multiplexing to NONE.

I think what may have happened is that it put multiplexing information into the video stream, which contain NO audio. This combined with the Audio Stream, when Muxed, caused the error. This is speculation at best. On the Adobe Site I read about errors in the 1.1 version of the MPG encoder, so it very well may have been the update that fixed my issue, too.

In the end, its done! I learned alot this first time going from letterboxed DV to a final product. The slideshow kicks butt over the video though, because the video my buddy took (sucks) and the photos were done by a kick-butt pro!

Now I have to do my nephews first trip to Disneyland. Since I have no money for gifts, that will be the gift to my brother!

Thanks again.