Have lots of brief qt 320x280 movies -- how optimize for best TV quality?

[pianoguy]

I have about 200 quicktime clips, each 320x280 pixels 30fps,
MPEG layer 3, mono 32 kHz. Each clip is about 2 minutes.
All in all they are 6 hours of instructional video.

I want to put these on DVDs with the best possible picture quality, to be watched
on a flat-screen TV. PAL!
I use TMPGEnc Source Creator 4 and DVD author.

When I add all files, the size defaults to 352x288, with bitrate 1409.
Three hours, or half the files results in 352 x 576, bitrate 3120.

I'm confused since the source is only 320x280.

Should I lower the number of files until Source Creator picks 720 x 256?
(or perhaps 704 x 256)

Thanks!

[guns1inger]

The source is very low resolution, and closest to VCD res - 352 x 288 - so that is probably the sweet spot. If you wanted to spend some time filtering in avisynth then perhaps half-D1 would be OK. However if you stick with 352 x 288 you can get 6 hours on a single disc.

[Baldrick]

I would use 352x240 NTSC and use highest possible bitrate, it's DVD compliant. Upresizing to 720x480/576 is not worth it...maybe if you use some advanced filters using avisynth, virtualdub.

And this is more a conversion issue than just authoring. Moving you.

[pianoguy]

Two good replies within five minutes! Thank you. What a great forum!

Are you saying quality will not improve if I put these on more than one DVD?

[ronnylov]

The quality can never be better than the original. Upsizing resolution will not make it contain any more details. With 352x240 or 352x288 you should use MPEG-1 according to DVD specification and then he maximum allowed bitrate is somewhere at 1800 kbit/s. Then you will fit around 5 hours on a single layer DVD. It may be good enough at 1409 kbit/s so I would try that and see how it goes.