Hello all, I'm brand new to this, as I just installed my Sony DRU500A DVD burner yesterday. I tried searching this forum for answers to my questions, but most related threads pertained to VCD.

I use Ulead Video Studio 6.0 to capture via firewire. I can capture AVI or MPEG-2 to my hard drive using their plug-ins. I have been using their DVD burner plug-in to burn DVDs. Thus far, I've only captured one digital video tape, and created several differend DVD burns from it, just experimenting. I bought four boxes of all the different DVD media (+/-, R-R/W), as the drive can burn all types. I have a Pioneer 3-disc standalone home theater DVD player which is my target drive to play the movies on.

I'm not concerned about hard drive space or trying to pack as much as I can onto a DVD. I have no problem transferring a single one-hour digital video tape to a single DVD disc.

So, here's my question:

What are the recommendations for MPEG-2 bitrate, video & audio, to use? I have tried capturing using MPEG-2 7168 VBR with audio bitrate of 224 (I think that was it). I'm wondering if this is overkill for the source of my Sony digital-8 camcorder. I'm also wondering what the boundaries are for DVDs that I want to play in a stand-alone recorder. If I'm not overkilling the source, is there a point of diminishing marginal return for bitrates with the MPEG-2 quality?

Basically, I want to preserve the original digital-8 tape quality as best I can, and I also don't want to be stupid about unecessarily large bitrates.

Any thoughts or opinions would be appreciated.

johnkhoffman@hotmail.com