anyone know the highest data rate i can get away with for my 3 minite DVD trailer? quality is the most important. its only going to be played on one DVD player, one of the newer sonys.
could you be so kind as to break it down? the m2v and the ac3 seperatly?
Why not do a couple of experiments to find out? Some people on this board say you should never go above 7Mb/sec; the official spec says anything under 9.8 is legal, but others say that DVD-R (burned) disks are not as easy to read as pressed disks, so the player sometimes has to re-read, which causes problems, etc.
In my own experience I found that an average bitrate of around 8Mb/sec gave excellent image quality and never caused a player to choke.
Your 2-channel AC-3 audio will be about .2Mb/sec, so if you shoot for 8 as your target, your video rate should be 7.8Mb/sec. But it's really not that critical.
The total can't exceed about 9.8 megabits/sec. On short videos, I normally use 8 Mbits CBR for the video and 192k for the AC3 audio. Some MPEG2 encoders will occasionally "spike" above the the set bitrate, so it's a good idea to leave a little "wiggle room", hence the 8 Mbits + 192 Kbits. I suppose you may be able to 9 Mbits + 192k AC3 and still leave enough headroom for spikes. I use ProCoder to make MPEG2 files and it doesn't spike, I'm not sure about the MainConcept encoder in Vegas.