~i heard that quicktime was a really nice format so i've got an hour and a half video that i test rendered in Quicktime with the uncompressed template and it came out to be 13 gigs. what "kbps" template should i choose to get the same video to fit on a standard 4.7 gig disc in Quicktime. (a brief explanation of "kbps" would be swell as well).
I am assuming your goal is to create good PC/web viewing files. So for SD, no, you still use the tutorial but you change the resolution, bitrate and possibly the frame rate.
So for example, use the tutorial linked, but use these values instead, leave the rest of the options the same as in the tutorial:
NTSC 4:3: 656x480, 1.000 aspect ratio, 1500 kbps, frame rate as your original file.
NTSC 16:9: 874x480, 1.000 aspect ratio, 2500 kbps, frame rate as your original file.
PAL 4:3: 768x576, 1.000 aspect ratio, 2500 kbps, frame rate as your original file.
PAL 16:9: 1024x576, 1.000 aspect ratio, 4500 kbps, frame rate as your original file.
Interesting. Why such higher bitrates for PAL? PAL encodes approximately the same number of pixels per second as NTSC so i don't know why you would need that much more bandwidth.
Because the output resolution suggested is not the same. DV uses the same bitrate for both PAL and NTSC for technical tape reasons (and because PAL uses fewer frames so it kind of balances out). But when you export in 1.000 aspect ratio, then the resolutions are very different than their non-square pixels resolution, and this must be taken into account. For example:
NTSC 656x480=309600*30 = 9288000
PAL 768x576=442368*25= 11059200
That's a 16% increase in overall data for PAL 4:3 over NTSC 4:3, that must be taken care by more bitrate. My suggestions for bitrate were of course rough, but PAL does need more bitrate than NTSC to have the same quality in 1.000 aspect ratio exports. When it comes to 16:9, the difference is at around 17% instead.
That's because I don't take frame rate into account, just resolution. Most of the users here are NTSC ones, so in my mind I have crystalized 30fps when I calculate. But in any way, I have tried all these suggestions, they all look good when exported.