There's a reasonable bitrate calculator on www.vcdhelp.com

Just made a 1 hour 55 min DVD. Used 2-pass VBR in CCE (Cinemacraft Encoder), average bitrate 4800 and the quality is great.

Nick

Lazy guy way is build your project in DVD-A using the AVI then let DVD-A optimize do the rest. Now, please bear in mind that I do this with 8mm and Hi8 fuzzy stuff people drop off so I am not sure how well it works with DVCAM source material. I did notice a high degree of pixelation on freeze frame after doing a 2 hour 8mm with 46 chapters c/w 30 sec motion thumbnails, 6 per page.

Peter

xjerx,
Don't forget that Hollywood DVDs are almost all dual layer DVDs and all of ours are single layer DVDs. My advice is TWO DVDs for a two hour production. I don't know why people insist on driving themselves crazy to squeeze two hours on a single layer DVD.

John

Using AC3 audio, your bitrate can be around 4,800,000 and still fit 2 hours just fine with simple menus. 2 hours is very doable.

If you click on this link, it will take you to a list of files. Find the "MpegCalculator_JHM," right-click on it, and select "Save Target As," you can download an Excel bitrate calculator that is based on one I found at one of the download sites. I have made it considerably more user-friendly, and put all the data entry at the top of the spreadsheet, where data entry should always be placed.

MPEG Bitrate Calculator

As for how much time to try to squeeze on a DVD, others have already pointed out that Hollywood DVDs are dual layer. In addition, they are only encoding 24 frames every second, wherease your (NTSC) video is 30 frames every second, and actually 60 fields per second. Therefore, it requires more bits per second to get the same level of quality.

Everyone has their own standards of what visual quality is acceptable, and the nature of the source footage has a huge impact on how well the MPEG encoding will proceed. However, to my fairly critical eye, with NTSC DV video of moving objects (i.e., NOT a talking head), if you encode at less than 6,000 kbps, you are going to see lots of changes from the original footage.

Again, this is not a hard and fast rule, and other people will have different ideas.

Once you get down to this level (6,000) or below, you should ALWAYS use two-pass encoding. At higher bitrates, this is pretty much a waste of time because the difference between average and maximum bitrates is not enough to improve quality. However, if you encode at 4,000, and you have a few high-motion scenes that the encoder can encode at 8.000, while leaving your talking head scenes at 3,500 (thus averaging out to 4,000), you will see a marked improvement in the average quality.

www.vcdhelp.com/calc

John, I couldn't download it. I kept getting an error message that said the address was incorrect.

John, I couldn't download it. I kept getting an error message that said the address was incorrect.

Sorry, Jay. I found out that Yahoo no longer provides "public" access to free Briefcase files. However, I think you can still get in if you click on this link. It should take you to a list of files. Find the "MpegCalculator_JHM," right-click on it, and select "Save Target As."

MPEG Bitrate Calculator