• Compression Techniques

  Episode Pro – Changes in BitRate not changing file size…

  Posted by Matthew London on March 18, 2007 at 12:48 pm

  Hi,

  I’ve been trying to use Epsiode Pro to compress MPEG-2 video for DVD.

  In the past I’ve used Apple’s Compressor with a maximum bit rate of 7.4 and an average rate of 6.5. This gave me a file size of about 3.9GB. This allowed me to fit an 83min video on DVD along with .ac3 audio.

  I tried the same settings in Episode Pro, but the resulting file size was 4.3GB, and DVDSP choked saying “Bit Rate Too High”
  So I tried experiementing with the settings in Episode, lowering the max and average bit rate, all the way down to 6900 max and 6000 average.

  BUT ALL THE SETTINGS PRODUCED THE EXACT SAME SIZE .m2v FILE !!!!!

  I tried this again with a shorter clip and got the same results. I even tried using the Quality based encoder settings at 100% and 90% and those gave me the same size file as well.

  Any ideas ?

  Craig Seeman replied 19 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Craig Seeman

  March 19, 2007 at 2:21 am

  Are you using Episode Pro 4.2.2 (latest version)?
  Are on PPC Mac or Intel?

  Are you saying your 83 minute source file always encodes to 4.3GB regardless of encode settings?

  As an experiment try using the Elementry Stream/Video – NTSC (or PAL if that’s the case) 3Mbit preset.
• 

  Matthew London

  March 19, 2007 at 2:17 pm

  >>Are you using Episode Pro 4.2.2 (latest version)?
  Yes

  >>Are on PPC Mac or Intel?
  PPC Mac

  >>Are you saying your 83 minute source file always encodes to 4.3GB regardless of encode settings?
  Yes, I’ve tried everything from max of 7.4, down to max of 6.7 or so, and average of 6.5 down to 6.0

  >>As an experiment try using the Elementry Stream/Video – NTSC (or PAL if that’s the case) 3Mbit preset.
  The preset does give me a smaller file.
  I also tried the 7Mbps preset which gives me a smaller file, but the preset is 1-pass – I want to use 2-pass, and the preset is bottom (lower) field and my source material is PAL 10bit uncompressed which is upper field.
  I made my custom settings by duplicating the preset and changing the data rates, passes and field order.
• 

  Craig Seeman

  March 19, 2007 at 2:39 pm

  [mlondon] “I also tried the 7Mbps preset which gives me a smaller file, but the preset is 1-pass – I want to use 2-pass, and the preset is bottom (lower) field and my source material is PAL 10bit uncompressed which is upper field.
  I made my custom settings by duplicating the preset and changing the data rates, passes and field order.”

  Assuming that’s all you changed in the preset, the clues are going to 2 Pass encoding and changing the field from Bottom First to Top First.

  Frame type defaults to Progressive. Did you leave that as is or changed that to Interlace?

  Are you using Frame Rate and/or Resize filter or any others?

  I don’t have any PAL 10 Bit Uncompressed to test with but I can arrange FTP access for you to upload a Gig or two for me to test with. Yes, that’s small relative to an 83 minute project but it might give me a clue.

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up