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[pbmc59]

Hello,
Presently I capture ( file transfer ) an hour of D8 using the firewire and Windows Movie Maker.
Next I encode this using the wizard in TMPGenc, CBR 4787 bit rate, with an output of both video and audio together. I set each hour up to fill half of a DVD+R.
I author and burn using TDA, and my quality ( to my newbie eye ) is great.
Whats the next step up?
Is it to encode only the video, and do what with the audio?
I have TDA w/ AC-3 plugin, TMPGenc, Gspot, Beesweet and Virtualdub.
Can I raise the bar in the quality of my DVDs, if so, in a broad sense, how?
Thank you for your time.
ps. thanks for all previous input to get me this far!

[jimmalenko]

Whats the next step up?
Is it to encode only the video, and do what with the audio?
I have TDA w/ AC-3 plugin, TMPGenc, Gspot, Beesweet and Virtualdub.
Can I raise the bar in the quality of my DVDs, if so, in a broad sense, how?

Sounds like you have done a fair job already

Up to you whether you try these but here goes;

Audio:
You could try 448kbps AC3 sound. I would use Virtualdub to Save As WAV and then BeSweet or TMPGEnc DVD Author's AC3 plugin for this.

Video:
Use 2-Pass VBR in TMPGEnc with settings of 9000 Max, and 3000 Min. Set your Average to whatever this bitrate calc says.

What's important is that you are happy with the quality. If your current settings make you happy, then good for you.

[WuphonsReach]

Switch to VBR encoding, you'll get much better visual results at the same bitrate (especially if you're trying to use a bitrate of less then 6000 with full-D1 or less then 3000 with half-D1 resolutions).

Personally, I use 256kbps AC3 (some would recommend 224), and I doubt you'll hear a difference between 256 and 448kbps (which is overkill in my book). More important with audio is cleaning up tape noise, power-line hums and normalizing the audio to 90% (-1 or -2 dB peaks). I use Cool Edit 2000 to do my audio clean-up but Adobe bought them out.

Also consider applying *lightweight* filtering in VDub (2D Cleaner with radius 1 threshold 10 or the Smart Smoother High Quality with radius 3-5 threshold 10-20).