DV Footage Quality (Transcode Settings)

[Kermit]

I’ve recently been doing some DVD authouring with Encore for a large company and we use a program called Cinema Craft Encoder (CCE) which allows us to encode video with any number of settings…mostly it alllows us to set a variable bitrate.

I’m pretty sure variable bit rates allow you to store video at a higher quality at a lower cost to storage by calculating the information (colour, gamma, luminance, chroma) contained in each frame.

If you set a variable bit rate of roughly 3000 or 3500 to 8000ish, with an average of 4000-5000ish with 8-10 passes; this should allow you to store about 135minutes safely on a DVD 5.

Otherwise if you can get DVD 9 you can store more and amp up your bit rate quit a bit, say 4000-4500 to 8000-8500 with an average of 6000-7500 (as you turn up your average bit rate you can turn down your passes – say 5-7 passes – this won’t save you much space but will save you a lot of time), these setings should allow you to store about 150minutes if not more (of course you can always turn down your bit rate if you wanna store more).

CCE might be a bit expensive…I do know that Premiere has some encode settings, but their a little basic and not worth much…you can probably find relevent program somewhere online.

Of course these settings are in PAL, but I doubt there will be much difference

[Flightmaster]

Thanks for the suggestion… I will try to look for the encoding software that you mention!

Best Wishes,
cP

Christian T. Petersen
Pentium 4.
4G Ram
260 HD

[Keith Fredericks]

Oh yeah, and don’t use Microsoft DV, as it causes compression artifacts – I hate them! Render it out uncompressed before encoding it in whatever program you’re using. I think the artifacts may even make the subsequent compression more difficult on a number of levels.