Choppy Distorted Audio After Encoding w/CBR
 

I captured some HDV 720p footage to test with editing system (Pinnacle Studio Plus) for an upcoming shoot. Requires constant bit rate/ 10,000 kbps.

I ended up with choppy audio when I played back the rendered fil in windows media player.

Any suggestions on what to do? Something different in settings I need to do?

It plays fine with variable bitrate. Plays smooth in pinnacle preview window after render.

Thanks
Lisa

what are you encoding to (what codec) and bitrate for the audio? what are the settings in pinnacle?

the CBR or VBR refers to the video encoding, the audio should be contstant bitrate at whatever bitrate you set it to. it's either a problem with the pinnacle audio encoder or some resource issue on your PC playing back (although if the video played smooth and the audio was choppy I would look to pinnacle as the source of the problem).

you could also try to render your audio by itself from your project to a WAV file and encode that outside pinnacle and use that as your audio track for your project (e.g. join that back with the rendered video track).

if you say it is playing smoothly in the preview in pinnacle and then is sounding 'wrong' afer encoding, I would suspect your encoder (although perhaps there is some hidden quirk with pinnacle that can be managed .. did you try the pinnacle board? it's on pinnaclesys.com). btw, it's only worth a certain amount of time fighting pinnacle quirks until you should try plan B, whatever that becomes..

I'm editing to mpeg-2 and audio bit is at 224.

One good bit of news is my customer ok'd today for the project to be vbr instead of cbr...so with this approval I can get the project completed but don't know what the problem is with he cbr.

Appreciate the help from the forum.
LB

mpeg2 is the video codec, the audio codec will be uncompressed (linear PCM) or AC-3, or mpeg1 layer 2. I'm not sure that pinnacle has an AC-3 encoder though so my guess would be that it's encoding to one of the other format (check the advanced settings or look at the settings in the section where you author / burn the disk).

one suggestion would be to try the other audio codec, whatever it is not using when it gives you problems. or, try changing the output bitrate to 192 and see if that fixes it.

also, what is your source audio format? may be an issue in transcoding it.

the thing that points to some problem with the software is that when you switch between two encoding processes for the video, the audio is affected...CBR vs. VBR should have no impact on the audio encoding (or again, encode those two separately and put them together on a disk).

if you're going to use pinnacle again it may be worth figuring it out if you can .

good luck!