While the DVD spec give 9.8 as the max, I have heard that some players will gag when the bitrate starts getting close to that, so if I were you I'd leave some headroom. I tend to doubt you will be able to see much difference between 9000 and 8000 anyway . . .

alan

There is no reason to fiddle with the MPEG-2 encoder settings. Leave at default and everything will be fine. If you videos aren't, then look inward.

Likely sources of problems.

1. poorly shot video, practice makes perfect.
2. camera not set to proper white balance (hint automatic isn't it)
3. poor lighting

The first covers the whole spectrum. There is only so much you can do with poorly shot video. You can use the numerous filers which help a lot, but remember a sow in a silk dress is still a pig.

Sorry, just another of my "strong" opinions again. The default settings weren't just guessed at. They were picked for a reason, after much trial and error would be my guess. While you can adjust settings with the custom button, doing so will frequently introduce more problems, not reduce them. So unless you have a REASON to fiddle, don't fiddle. Once you get to a certain bitrate anything higher is basically wasted bandwidth.

thanx for the great information and i seriously never thought abaout the music files even my movie is a total video and music project ...i need a good audio quality too...so one last question...when i want to put it on dvd do i have to split the audio channel and put it on the dvd author software seperately?...i thought after rendering to mpeg2 it wouuld be easy to put on dvd like a finished package.... my filesize is fine my music sounds great on computer when i play the mpeg2 format file...anyways if there is any more comments how to set those music files to sound good and keep the video quality best i would appreciate it..once again thanx for all the help..:)

The way you bring the files in will depend on what authoring program you are using.

Higher end programs (& some lower) tend to like the video & audio brought in as seperate streams (MPEG-2 video in the shape of a .m2v or .mpv file & audio as 16bit 48kHz .wav file).

The way the audio is out put will again depend on authoring program. NTSC spec for DVDs is only supporting Dolby audio or PCM (MPEG audio is not supporeted but some players play it) so if you want compatability you are best sticking with these.

The cheapest authoring program that supports Dolby is probably DVDit PE at about $600.

PCM should provide slightly better audio quality than Dolby but it will use up a lot more space on your disc because it is uncompressed at about 1600kbs compared to typical Dolby/MPEG of 224kbs

I have tried the default setting of 6000high, 4000Avg and also changed it to 8000 high, 6000avg. At the latter setting I can see no difference between the completed film played from my Sony DV camcorder and the finished product played on a DVD player. At the lower default setting of 4000avg, I notice just the slighest difference in scenes that are semi-fast moving, but so little difference that you could get away with the 4000avg and nobody but a professional (which I am not) would notice. The nice thing about the 4000 avg is that you get 2 hours on one disc. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, however, I use the 6000 avg so that at least I won't notice any difference. This still gives me 1 hour and 20 minutes and none of my movies are more than 1/2 hour.

To get 2 hours on a DVD, with PCM audio, the average would need to be around 3,450,000. Using Dolby audio, the average could be raised to around 4,800,000

DVD Workshop supports AC3 (does not encode to AC3, but accepts audio in AC3 format). In version 1.2 you have to mux the AC3 and video before importing, the upcoming version 1.3 will allow you to import elementary streams.