SD DVD bitrate

Stasoid wrote on 10/20/2008, 11:40 PM
I'm trying to create a standart definition DVD disc off of a Vegas 9.0b project and found it a surprisingly low bitrate (around 6Mb/s) in the output MPEG2 file I've rendered.
I couldnt find amomg the rendering settings how to increase MPEG2 bitrate to at least 8 or 9Mbs. In the DVD NTSC template "Custom" option is grayed out.
Could somebody help with this or what would be the best (quality wise) way to make an SD DVD in Vegas 9.0?

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 10/21/2008, 12:15 AM
I created an 8 mbps DVD for my brother once, and his cheap player was stomping every 10 seconds. Trust me, don't max it out, many players have problems with it, just use sensible rates.
Stasoid wrote on 10/21/2008, 11:31 AM
It must have been variable bitrate you used to encode with 8Mbs average and then there is a chance that peak bitrate in some fast motion scenes exceeded the maximum allowed 9.8Mbs so an inexpensive DVD player with a small buffer size couldnt handle it without dropping frames.
I've made many DVD discs always using 9.5 meg per second CBR and never experienced a playback problem after on any type of a DVD player me or my friends/relatives used.

Anyways, I think 6Mbs is a little bit to low for a home video footage and I was looking for a way to crank it up to the level where compression artifacts become unnoticeable.
darkframe wrote on 10/22/2008, 1:31 AM
Hi,

Here's a nice explanation and a graph which might help you in deciding which bittrate to use.

Cheers

darkframe
Chienworks wrote on 10/22/2008, 5:08 AM
Eugenia isn't likely to have made that mistake.

The studio version of Vegas doesn't offer custom MPEG encoding options, so you're a bit stuck there. However, you could render to DV .avi and bring that .avi file into DVD Architect. Use it's optimize feature to select the highest bitrate possible to fit on the disc. I suspect though that DVDA isn't going to use a bitrate higher than 8 maximum either. Almost everyone will recommend not peaking over 8 to remain compatible with most DVD players.
Stasoid wrote on 10/26/2008, 6:52 PM
Thanks guys for your answers. Low bitrate is not the biggest problem that I discovered in encoding DVDs with Vegas. My original footage is AVCHD 1080i Upper Field First when encoded into SD MPEG2 with VMS becomes Bottom Field First. This field order swap results in an annoying jitter on fast motion scenes when DVD is played back on a standalone DVD player.
Vegas MPEG encoder doesnt give you an option to select field order for the target file, it just encodes BFF ignoring original one.
Finally, I end up rendering my project into an intermediate fomat uncompressed 1080i YUV (400gig an hour) first, and then converting it to an SD MPEG2 TFF with Canopus Procoder and authoring in Sony DVD Architect.
This workaround is a very timeconsuming and takes a lot of disc space of the hard drive.
Maybe I'm missing something but I was wondering how people deal with this when creating SD DVDs if their source footage happened to be Upper Field First.