Higher bitrate in compressor and dark video - HELP!

I should have posted this a day or two ago. Now, I'm in the 11th hour, trying to figure this out.

PROBLEM ONE

So, I have an instructional video, edited in FCP. Although shot in HDV, it's now in an SD format (DV50). All the sequences add-up to 2 hours, 10 minutes. After doing a lot of research here at the Cow and on other sites, I decided to encode it with Compressor (from Studio version 1) using the "One Pass" setting at 7.0 mb/sec bitrate. I realize this is high, but from all my investigations, I'm convinced this will work best. And this is important - I know this should yield a disc larger then what will fit on DVD-5. Thats fine with me. I have long ago decided that DVD-9 would be okay (yes, there's other technical issues with the dual layer, but I'm okay with those).

Here's the issue... There's no "CBR" setting in compressor. It's only "One Pass." And the bitrate you set with this One Pass setting is called the "Average Bitrate." Not the "Constant Bitrate." On all of my initial encodes, setting thei "{Average" to 7, the bitrate on the resulting m2v files only goes to 4.5 mb/sec. So, to "game" the system, I tried using the One pass VBR setting, using 6.0 as the average, and 7.0 as the max. No luck. The files still had a bitrate under 6. How is this possible?

Everything I've found here talks about getting the bitrates down low so the media will fit (and of course play). I'm trying to force the bitrate HIGHER.

Anyone have this issue?

PROBLEM TWO
On all my encodes, the video looks dark on my CPU. So I adjusted down the gamma to .7 with a filter in Compressor. Anyone experience this?

Thank you!!!