Capture & Authoring Bitrate

[Amirhosain]

Hi, I want to capture a 175min VHS tape and make DVD with Pinnacle Studio 500 PCI capture card and Pinnacle Studio 10.6 software.
In capture mode, studio 10.6 says MPEG capture for DVD best quality is 6000Kb/s, but in DVD making, it says 7500Kb/s gives the best quality.
My question is, what bitrate should I use for capture and DVD make for my footage not exceed a DVD+R DL 8.5GB with an acceptable quality? I test 6000Kb/s for capture, but 7500Kb/s for authoring makes only 121min on a DVD+R DL 8.5GB
I know higher bitrates both for capture and authoring gives better qualities, but is it worth to have 3 or may 4 DVD+R 4.7GB for a 175min footage and changing media in the middle of watching?!

[guns1inger]

A bitrate calculator will tell you what the average bitrate should be to make your movie fit a single disc. Vcalc says that with a single 224 kbps audio track, you should use an average bitrate of 6111 kbps. Bitrate calculators vary a small amount depending on what overheads and actual target sizes they use, but they should all end up pretty close. Ignore the preset "quality" bitrates, as these are rarely right, even in expensive software like Premiere Pro or Vegas.

Depending on the quality of the tape, you should be able to get a reasonable result at that bitrate, although I would consider doing a 2-pass VBR encode. Your other alternative would be half-D1 at 6111 kbps CBR encoding, although this might soften the image.

[Amirhosain]

Thanks for your guide. These calculators help with DVD authoring, but for each calculated bitrate, what bitrate is suitable for capturing?
i.e I'm confused what's the relation between capturing and authoring bitrates? (capturing bitrate should be equal to, greater or smaller than authoring bitrate?)
Consider capturing VHS in full AVI format (not MPEG), here no hardware compression occurs by capture card chipset, because no MPEG compression occurs, but rendering takes about 6Hrs for making a 175min DVD!
Also, please give me a description about half-D1.

[guns1inger]

You have a choice.

You can capture at a very high bitrate to preserve quality, then edit, then re-encode at a lower bitrate for authoring. However mpeg is a poor format for editing. You also have the issue that it is a lossy compression format, so you loose data on both the first encode and the second encode.

Or

You can capture at the correct bitrate initially, and use what you have for authoring.

Other things to factor in

1. Higher bitrates require more HDD space
2. Capturing directly to mpeg compression means Constant BitRate (CBR) encoding, which is fine for higher bitrates, but not so good for lower bitrates.

You also talk about full avi, but what format ? AVI is a container, the codec you use determines the compression. There are dozens of possible codecs for AVI, from high compression mpeg-4 variants to lossless and uncompressed formats.

From a quality standpoint, if you want the results on a single disc, capture to a lossless avi format, such as lagarith or huffyuv, then do a 2-pass VBR encode to mpeg. That could take anywhere from 6 - 12 hours to complete.

Half-D1 is a valid mpeg format that uses hald the horizonyal resolution of full-D1. See What is DVD (top left corner) for more information.

[Amirhosain]

Please note I won't edit the movie. So captured file goes to authoring directly.
From your description and considering no edition process, I should capture at 6094kbps (Calculated by VideoCalc 1.1) MPEG-2 and then author at 6094kbps (Again calculated by VideoCalc 1.1)MPEG-2 VBR 2-pass with 256Kbps audio.
These parameters give me fair qulality and fills up DVD+R DL 8.5GB, Correct?

[jimmalenko]

Please note I won't edit the movie. So captured file goes to authoring directly.
From your description and considering no edition process, I should capture at 6094kbps (Calculated by VideoCalc 1.1) MPEG-2 and then author at 6094kbps (Again calculated by VideoCalc 1.1)MPEG-2 VBR 2-pass with 256Kbps audio.
These parameters give me fair qulality and fills up DVD+R DL 8.5GB, Correct?

I think you're confusing a step or 2.

AFAIK there is no such thing as an "authoring bitrate" - the process of authoring is simply compiling all the parts (video, audio and possibly subtitles) into a DVD-compliant file structure (IFO, BUP and VOB files). It also may or may not involve adding chapter(s) and / or menu(s).

There's pretty much a total of 3 steps in this;

1. Capture
2. Re-encode to DVD specs
3. Author

The best idea IMHO is that you capture to DVD-compliant specifications first go, and then your encoding (and possibly authoring) software should let it pass through, without having to re-encode it. So effectively you only have to do steps 1 and 3 as 2 is not required.

[guns1inger]

You can't capture with 2-pass vbr. You capture with 6094 kbps CBR, or a single pass VBR with no guaranteed file size.