Procoder Bitrate question

[bode]

I have some DV AVI footage from a live show. It contains some fast movement shots of the drummer and there's strobe lighting.

The show is approximately 90 mins long and I plan to record this to a DVDR. I want to retain the FULL quality of the original footage so my questions are:

In Canopus Procoder...

1. What bitrate should I encode to? I don't mind using two discs if necessary.

2 Is VBR the same as mp3 vbr encoding ie: you are not wasting
space on sections of the recording which do not require a high bit rate ( slow quiet sections for example) is CBR not wasting space?

3. I did a test using 7000 cbr master quality. It looked great, but when I checked the bitrate using my standalone dvd player, it reported bitrates of 8-9.5. How come? when I encoded this at 7000.

enlightenment please thanks

[bugster]

I don't use ProCoder but your question are pretty generic and not really specific to procoder so I shall try and help.

1. What bitrate should I encode to? I don't mind using two discs if necessary.

Really only you can answer this as only you know what quality level is acceptable. Higher bitrate = higher quality (in general).

2 Is VBR the same as mp3 vbr encoding ie: you are not wasting
space on sections of the recording which do not require a high bit rate ( slow quiet sections for example) is CBR not wasting space?

You have the right idea there.

3. I did a test using 7000 cbr master quality. It looked great, but when I checked the bitrate using my standalone dvd player, it reported bitrates of 8-9.5. How come? when I encoded this at 7000.

Not usre, maybe your DVD player reports the MAX bitrate that is in the mpeg header, or maybe you made a mistake when setting up procoder. Use Bitrate viewer to check the real bitrate of the mpeg.

From your description of the the video (fast movement, strobe lighting etc) you will need a high bitrate for these scenes. VBR is probably your best bet with the max set to 9 or even 9.5Mbps, min 2mbps and average about 5mbps. Encode that and check the quality. If its not good enough in the low motion scenes, increase the bitrate and split to two disks. WIth those figures though, you can't go much higher for the MAX bitrate so the high motion scenes won't get much better.

FYI, the MAX bitrate allowed for DVD video is 9.8Mps. The MAX total bitrate is 10.08, so using the max bitrate for video leaves little room for audio. Even at 9.5Mps max video you will need to use 2chan Ac3 or mp2 audio.