i tried narrowing the bitrate range by changing the minimum bitrate to 700 and leaving the max at 2500 on a test i did.. the result, which i expected to look much better, actually looked MUCH worse.. TONS of artifacts and gibs in every possible location. same test with min of 300 gave the desired results any ideas why this would happen?

yes,i make it too...same result!...and more mosqitoes.

The problem is that the various interactions between the processes that go on when video is MPEG-compressed are extremely complex. Individually they are simple enough, but when you put them together (particularly when you're talking about VBR) it becomes very difficult to predict how the encoder will react to various parameter changes.

All we can really do is keep testing until we find something that works in the way we anticipate. This involves many false-starts and hours of work that end in frustration, but every now and again a technique is discovered that really does work and leads to actual visible improvements in quality (see the "CQ vs CQ_VBR" thread for an example, which is looking more and more promising with every post).