A little survey...

[KRSESQ]

What's the highest bitrate DVD (MPEG-2) format video you've ever created (either CBR or 2-pass VBR) and did it play okay in the DVD players/drives you tested in? What brands were those players/drives? Perhaps most importantly, what brand of DVD media have you had the most luck with and seems the most robust?

Just want to see if there's a general consensus before I commit to archiving some VERY important S8mm film transfers.

Incidently, I've achieved some SPLENDID film-to-video transfers using a Sony DSR-PD150 DVCAM and my homebuilt telecine rig. Someday I'll write an article .

Kevin

[Brian Ellis]

If you are transferring from S8, anything higher than about 4000 will make no visible difference to the quality. GIGO. I've done one test with DV input where I rendered virgin capture to MPEG-2. I could detect no visible improvement over 6000 CBR.

These data were repeated with optimisation for both computer non-interlaced and TV interlaced viewing. The figures were the same.

Computer viewing is in the burner drive (Pioneer A03) and the TV viewing from a Grundig set-top player, with Korean mechanics.

My favourite blank is Creation (made in Greece). The biggest one to avoid, in my experience, is Imation. I've had good results with Pioneer and Verbatim , but I insist on always recording at 1 x for best results.

[mits]

The highest bit rate i've ever used to create a dvd was 8500 kbit for video (CBR and VBR) and 384 kbit for AC3 audio. It was burned with a SONY DRU-500AX and it played flawlessly on my both dvd players ( a picky Sony DVP-S725D and a play-everything cheapo Yukai). Also it played fine on my dvd-drive a Pioneers 106s. As far as the media are concerned i have tried many and i had good results with Philips DVD+R (either 2,4x or 4x), PrimeDisc DVD-R (4x), and TDK DVD+/-R (2,4x 2x) (all disks burnt up to the last byte). Stay away from Princo DVD-R, whatever no-name DVD-R, and for That's Right it was hit and miss.

[Flying dutchman]

If I know it's going to fit on a single DVD+R anyway, I use the highest bit rate possible (CBR 9000 in my last project).


If the clip is longer than about an hour, I recommend to do the following "Postprocessing trick" :

- Render your project at the highest possible bitrate

- Let your DVD authoring program produce the DVD structures. File size is unimportant.

- when it's ready, use Pinnacle Instantcopy to shrink the Vob's so that the project fits exactly on one DVD+R. Pinnacle does an absolutely incredible job at re-quantization and is very fast. The resulting output has variable bit rate and there's almost no visible quality loss.


This technique is a bit like 2-pass VBR, actually...

[mits]

Hi FD,
that was a nice thought, i assume it will be the same if i use dvdshrink (freeware transcoding tool) instead of Pinnacle's InstantCopy. But what would it better to use for the first encoding (VBR or CBR)?

[Dr Mordrid]

As Brian noted going much over 4000-6000 kbps doesn't give much advantage with DV sources UNLESS you're doing a lot of compositing.

Even then setting a higher compression quality and a DC of 9 or 10 should be done before upping the bitrate anyhow.

Dr. Mordrid

[Flying dutchman]

The re-quantizer of Instantcopy is much better than DVDshrink. Get a time-limited trial from their website (www.pinnaclesys.com). 50% bitrate reduction with no visible loss is possible.

I recommend encoding with CQ 85 or 90 in tMpeg and let the bitrate run freely between 1500-9000.