Bitrate Question

I'm transcoding a wedding project at DV High 2 pass 7mbs. It looks great when I
play the finished DVD on my computer, but when I use my Playstation 2, the video
is jittery. Do you think this is a problem with the Playstation not being able
to keep up with the bitrate? I tried one time to transcode at 4mbs, and the
compression was obvious. Blocked, blotchy video. So 4mbs is not an option.

Hi David,

I had the similar problem once. I edited my project in PP 1.5 and exported it
out with the optimized stills and deinterlaced video footage boxes checked which
caused the problem for me. I unchecked both boxes and exported the project again
and it worked fine in Encore. In the rendering order I use lower footage first.
If this isn't the problem you can check the bitrate using "Bitrate
Viewer" which is a free program off the net. I hope this helps some
anyway.

Good luck,

When reading "jittery" my first thoughts go to a field order reversal
issue. The field order setting of the MPEG encoder has to match the field order
of the source video. Normally all DV video is "lower field first"
(with the exception of PAL DV captured with a Matrox codec which may produce
"upper field first" video).

What do you mean by "jitter"?
I'm not trying to be funny either - but most people use this description
incorrectly.
If you mean if literally flickers, then Ruud's suggestion is most likely the
correct answer, and you have either
A - got the field order wrong, or
B - (and this is the most likely option) mixed field orders somehow during
editing. I have done this countless times before I started getting into the
habit of always exporting progressive scan....this eliminates field order
problems completely. When encoding to MPEG-2 later, as the source is a
progressive scan one instead of interlaced, when the encoder re-interlaces the
stream it can only have one field order.

If however you mean playback is choppy & skips/sticks/sync drifts etc, then
it is the bitrate being too high for the PS to keep up with. This is a
limitation of the reduced reflectivity on written media being played back on
either a machine with too low a buffer memory (common, especially in
PlayStation, which is primarily a games console, not a DVD-Video player) and
Sony machines in general are all prone to this problem.
If this is the case, then the best you can do is to reduce the bitrate to a
lower one - try 6500kbps CBR with Dolby Digital Audio, as written discs in these
machines should not exceed a total combined rate of 7,000 kbps.

One of these answers will sort you out though.