I recently purchased the Panasonic e85h and I hoping someone with more experience than I can answer a couple of questions. I had a 3 hour program recorded to the hard drive, SP speed. Tried to dub to DVD and selected FR (Flexible Recording) figuring that the machine would make the 3 hours fit on the blank DVD. It fit, but it only used less than half of the DVD, of course making the resulting recording poor quality. Is there some step I’m missing in dubbing that will make the machine fill the DVD? This was not done using high speed dubbing, but the original was recorded with the high speed dubbing option.

This brings me to my second question. the manual says if you enable high speed dubbing, then record to the hard drive, the machine will record at a fixed bit rate. I dubbed one of these recordings to DVD, stuck it in my DVD player, turned on the display that allows you to see the bit rate and expected to see it fixed. However, it was fluctuating as it normally would. at a higher rate in scenes with more motion. Has anyone with a Panasonic machine tried looking for differences in quality between recordings made with VBR on and off?

Thanks.