4 passes m2v a lot bigger than first pass m2v?

Hi Pyre8, I'm not sure I understand what you say; there's no average bitrate setting for the first pass. Only Q factor, min and max bitrate. What I did is: - one pass VBR to obtain a .vaf file (and a 1.2GB m2v file) with Q=60, min=500 and max=8000 - multi-pass VBR (with passes set to 3) to obtain the final 3.8GB m2v with min=500, avg=4500 and max=8000.

What was the average bit rate at the end of the first pass? Did you enter/change the average bit rate to 4500 for the multi-pass?

open up the first pass in bitrate viewer and you will find that it is at a fair bit lower than your 4.5mbit, what you should do is start at 2mbit to do the robshot method properly. Enf...

Do you need to use the bit rate viewer? 

At the end of the first pass, when you click on the Multi-pass button, the options change from the Q/min/max to average/min/max (just below the Multi-pass option box). I thought that the average shown at that stage was the average that CCE had used in its first pass. Or is it just a starting value that CCE defaults to when doing a multi-pass? Okay, at least we know why the file size grew now;)

yea i've used the (ligos lsx) a few times and i really didn't like it. No matter the picture was blocky and the time it took to finish the movie was slow.