bitrate - clueless or SOL?

[TheFamilyMan]

I'm in the middle of converting our home videos from 8mm analog to DVD. It was shot in the 90's and early 00's using a '90s middle of the road sony camcorder. I capture to AVI at 352/480 using huffyuv AVI and encoding using TMPGEnc at the same resolution with noise filters set at 13,1,13 standard quality and bitrate control at CQ 90 9000,0. I use such huge bit rates because at any lower settings, the results look like crap in high action scenes, of which there are a lot in our footage. Conventional wisdom says I should only need 4000-6000 max bitrate needed for excellent quality 1/2 D1.
Is my need for overly high bitrates due to:

a) my home footage quality stinks, in term of too much video noise and undue camera motion?
b) my capture card stinks, adding some sort of MPEG hating video noise (nvidia VIVO AGP using the phillips chip)?
c) MPEG2 simply hates unstablized camcorder footage?
d) being clueless?

My completed DVDs look excellent, though I only get about 1:15 on a disk. Any suggestions?

[reboot]

I would say you're doing well to get 1:15 on a disk.
High motion video requires high bitrate. There's not much else you can do.
There are ways in tmpgenc to maintain some quality, without overdoing the bitrate. Have you tried CQ-VBR set to quality 100 and adjust bitrate down ~7000? Might just get 2 hours on a disk, and quality shouldn't be too bad, but only you can tell.