[Daniel Low]

There is no one answer, there is no ‘which one is best’ however in my opinion, I’d go with something like IMX(50) rather than Apple-specific formats like ProRes. Avoid DV25.

[Daniel Low]

You can get some great results using VP6/Flash, not as good as H.264 but still. Look at these examples of what you can achieve with Youtube:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WBWCxrsUh14
and
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sTj5Ur1E6HA

Obviously ‘quality’ is subjective.
You might get better results using a different transcoder, I highly rate Episode, for example.

[Daniel Low]

Try the settings I first gave:

720×576 is non-square pixel material. Flash is always square pixel so if you need 480 wide Flash then the output should be 480×360 (480/1.33 = 360).

PAL is normally interlaced, so deinterlace for the output.

Try a less frequent keyframe setting – too many keyframes can hurt quality sometimes.

Make sure you are using the VP6 codec

[Daniel Low]

To minimise the quality loss while transcoding:
Keep the frame rate & frame size the same and increase the datarate for both audio and video, by how much will really depend on the content and how sucessful will depend on the source .mov codec.

Don’t forget, you can’t polish a turd.

[Daniel Low]

Searching for “HDV SD compressor 3 DVD SP” on Google gives the following link, and it just happens to be one of the best resources out there:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/hdv_to_sd_dvd.html

Good luck!

[Daniel Low]

As a quick fix, add a filter to drop the saturation, and then tweek the gamma, brightness and contrast to taste.

[Daniel Low]

Where did you get 480×384? It’s neither 4:3 or 16:9.
Why no deinterlace? Was it shot progressive?

If it wasn’t shot progressive then you really should deinterlace.
480×384 will distort the picture – try 448×336 (ideal) or 480×360

[Daniel Low]

Well 620×370 is not 16:9 nor are the axis equally divisable by 8.

Try either 640×360 or 512×288, both of these are spot on 16:9 and equally divisible by 8.

H.264 is a good choice, the data rate will depend on the complexity of the content.

[Daniel Low]

This will help you figure out what MPEG-2 data rate to use:

https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm

[Daniel Low]

Yup, put the ‘high quality’ 2.5 hours onto one dual layer DVD. Split the rest over as many DVDs as you can get away with.
Start with the 120minute preset and reduce the datarate to fit. Don;t forget to encode your audio to AC3 to save some extra space.

Transcoding to H.264 won’t help in this case as no DVD players accept that format.
MPEG-2 is the only official DVD-Video format, although there are plenty on players out there that work with DVDs with MPEG-4 (Xvid, Divx) content.