Normal bitrate for DVD from hand held DV?

[johnells]

I have family videos I have transferring to my hard disk. All of it is DV (AVI) format. Some of the source was Hi8 video (dropped into my D8 machine and converted to DV). A little bit was 8mm also dropped into my D8 for conversion and the rest true D8. I plan on batching these AVIs through TMPGEnc and want to use a good all round video bitrate for writing to DVDs. What do you recommend for video bitrate? Is 2 pass VBR worth the wait?. Also, what motion estimation is good for this material? Given this is not Hollywood quality

John

[guns1inger]

I use Vegas and the mainconcept encoder, but the basics are similar. My personal choice high 8000, low 4200, average 6000 2-pass vbr. Of course mainconcept is significantly faster than tmpgenc, so 2-pass is not the same imposition. I also use Vegas to produce at least a 2 channel (and sometime 5.1) AC-3 audio.

If you don't have a lot of movement (pans, zooms, action in frame) then CBR at 8000 will give you 70 - 90 minutes of high quality.

As I said, this is all personal. You should select a couple of scenes from each set of source material and do a couple of test encodes. You only need a couple of minutes of footage, so encoding will be quick. Burn the results to an DVD/RW and see what makes you happy. After all, you are the one who has to live with the results.

[johnells]

Hey thanks GS. Your suggestions are in line with what I am testing. I am writing an RW right now so I should be able to see how it turned out. I am sticking with 2 channel MPEG audio as the source is nothing special. In fact I think the camera records 32KHz natively.

John