bitrate for vhs on dvd

[frogger]

I am taking all of my old home movies and archiving them on dvd. I obviously don't need DVD quality since my originals are from VHS. I am capturing with Vegas 4.0.

My question is - is there a certain setting or bitrate I should use when I encode to MPEG2? I figure since I'm not encoding Digital Video (like Digitla8), then I can encode at a lower quality and get more video onto the DVD. I'm just not sure what settings to use so that I don't lose any quality, but don't make the file sizes too large.

Thanks.

[bunyip]

I'm doing some testing now on this, I am using 'half-D1' (352 x 576 PAL) standard at a rate of about 3000 and the results are quite good from a VHS source. This gives me about 3hrs per disk but you could drop the rate down even more to get close on 4 hrs of acceptable video.

[frogger]

I've just rendered some of my VHS videos as half D1 and a max of 3500 bitrate. I'm also trying some of my DV video at half D1 (full bitrate) and we'll see how they look when I get home tonight and play them on my standalone. I assume if I can get away with good quality at half D1 then I'll be able to fit a lot more on a DVD.

[energy80s]

If you are outputting at half D1 resolution then aim for a bitrate between 3Mbps and 4Mbps as this will give the same bitrate to pixel ratio as full D1 at 8Mbps.