Nothin' is easy! Here's why...
 

Nothing is made easy!

I’m trying to compress an HDV project on Premiere CS 3.2 to my first ever Blu-ray MPEG-2 file in Adobe Media Encoder to a standard sized dvd.

The material being shrunk is a collection of .m2t files.

The roadblock lies with the audio.

Adobe for some odd reason choose only to give 2 choices:

1) To utilize AC3/Dolby sound you are forced to pay a 3rd party vendor a whopping $295 for the privilege. If you can afford/justify that, then one than gets to select a considerably higher bit rate (at least double)which certainly will yield better quality.

or:

2) The ONLY other option is PCM audio (which takes up a lot of space) so that the max bit rate you can select is dismal & unacceptable.

Anotherwords, that’s approx a value of 4 which is about 1/10th of the highest possible setting which is 40 across the board (min, target & max).

A HDV video compressed at only 4 is going to look bad, pure and simple.

So, how do I get around the pay $295 for AC3 obstacle?

What happened to other audio formats as an alternative?

That does not at all seem fair to me.

What did you guys do to solve the problem?

Advice please.

Thanks.

Most of us use Adobe Encore to authour the Video and Audio...
Therefore, you'll get an .M2V stream, and a .WAV file.

When you build the image, Encore encodes for .AC3..It's built into the program..
Yeah, it's stupid to buy a third party encoder for audio...

If you don't have Encore at your disposal, then think about exporting the .WAV individually, and finding a freeware solution to your problem..