Of COURSE you care about bitrate. Exceed 8Mbps, and you run a very high risk of your DVD not playing on most settop players.
You can:
Let DVDA optimize for size
or
Use a bitrate calculator, keeping menus and so forth in mind.
It's NOT just about high bitrates.
Compression is an art to a degree. This is why as recently as a year ago, compression technicians were referred to as "compressionists" because they know how to do this. Spend a few days at a compression prep lab in Burbank, you'll know what I mean. There's a lot more to it than bitrate. Cropping, saturation, luma, contrast....

This is a question that many many people ask and there really isn't any right or wrong answer. Some people will jack up the bitrate as high as they possibly can thinking it will give them the best quality. Normally it is the exact opposite, once you reach a certain limit there will really be no noticeable diffrence between say 8Mbps and 7Mbps. Plus when you get that high you will most likely encounter a lot of playback problems with the diffrent players and DVD drives out there. Once you do enough compression you will eventually be able to look at a video and know exactly what bitrate you need to ancode it at to get the best results, no 2 videos will be the same.

The motto I always go by is always try to use the lowest possible bitrate the get the quality you need. Normally I use a CBR of 4-5Mbps and I rarely have to go higher than that.

Another common problem is that people look at hollywood produced DVD's and try to get their videos to look that good. The problem is that hollywood DVD's are just that...hollywood DVD's. They shoot and edit with far better equipment than you or I will ever have, and they have access to proprietary eoncoders and DVD authoring software that we again will never see. There is basically no way that your video that you shoot on a MiniDV camera will look as good as a hollywood DVD. Once you realize that, then you can start to learn more about compression and know what does and what doesn't work.

The best way to learn, is to experiment. I'm not saying you have to render out a 64 minute video 20 times and see what looks best, just pick a small portion of the video, maybe 2-3 minutes where there have been problems and render it out with diffrent settings and pay close attention to how those diffrent settings effect your video.

you can get the exact bitrate required here http://www.videohelp.com/calc

The only bad thing about the calculator is that if you have a 10 minute program it will give you a value of like 9Mbps which is way too high, I would only use that if you have a video that is like 90 minutes and you need to know the highest you can use to get it to fit on the disc, then take that value and subtract a little from it.

Reading this takes me back to when I started using Video Factory, it had est. file size in the render options message box. Still wonder why it gone since VV3.

Hunter

8550 max for main concept encoder 1 for 2 pass
7800 for CQ for main concept

8000 for tmpgenc or procoder for 1 or 2 pass
7800 for tmpgenc for CQ

9000 for 2 or more pass CCE , 7500 for CCE CQ

Probably reason its gone is now you have a number of options with the audio as well so the final files size is not affected only by the vision bitrate.