help preserving vid quality for avi>DVD and what programs

[spreadahead]

well, I have learned ALOT since registering here and have gotten to a point wherei can't find an answer

I have matched up my audio and a friends video for a band we work for into a 11GB total .avi file with great vid picture quality...
1what program do you recomended using to convert to DVD?

TMPEC looks pretty bad so???

2also, will going from avi>MPEG degrade the quality?

3 and finally, is there an .avi shrink program or should I take the converted MPEG and run it through DVDshrink?


thanks so much for this forum and if you ever need any live audio recording or mixing help, I'm your man

tim

[reboot]

What is the running time of the video?
Stick that in the Bitrate Calculator and see what bitrate you come up with.

[spreadahead]

9452 kbit/s

duh on my part, but what does this mean?

[reboot]

This is the average bitrate you can use for the VIDEO portion of the encode. The AUDIO portion is 224kbps.
That is a very high average, and I wouldn't go over 8000, or your standalone player may not play it.
With the right settings in tmpgenc, you should end up with a really nice DVD.

[guns1inger]

Go for a 2-pass vbr encode, this will use the bitrate most efficiently across the length of the movie. Expect it to take several hours. You could also consider procoder express or CCE basic as encoders. Both are faster than tmpgenc.

[mats.hogberg]

1) TMPGEnc is not bad at encoding to DVD mpeg.
2) Yes, since mpeg2 is not a lossless format, quality will degrade. The thing is to minimize the quality loss.
3) It's always better (if we're talking about quality) to encode at the right bitrate to begin with, than encoding to a (for the storage media/format) too high bitrate, and then shrink it to fit. Shrinking the AVI would be pointless, as source file size is irrelevant - only length (in time) matters.

/Mats