Quote: Turning that around, how does the bit-rate, etc. of a standard movie on DVD compare to the various settings in PD?

Many "production" movies run avg bitrates of about 4-5Mb/sec and virtually all use variable bitrate achieved with a highly efficient multipass encoder to achieve such great quality even in fast motion scenes. Virtually all dvd movies are also dual layer and have been for years. PD on the other hand uses a constrained variable bitrate with an avg of 8Mb/sec, (max=8.3) , as you can see, one is virtually 50% behind the eight ball already. PD is a average consumer encoder and in my opinion subpar to several in the same price range or free. Good at editing features, poor at DVD HQ encoding.

I actually get much better DVD HQ quality by preproducing outside of PD a MPEG2 which I then use in the PD timeline for editing. If you keep within known bitrate guidelines, SVRT will be used when creating a DVD or DVD folder and only "edited" sections see a minor quaility degradation. Some are happy with PD DVD HQ encoding, I find it lacking in quality for the things I film.

Jeff

Quote:

Quote: Turning that around, how does the bit-rate, etc. of a standard movie on DVD compare to the various settings in PD?

Many "production" movies run avg bitrates of about 4-5Mb/sec and virtually all use variable bitrate achieved with a highly efficient multipass encoder to achieve such great quality even in fast motion scenes. Virtually all dvd movies are also dual layer and have been for years. PD on the other hand uses a constrained variable bitrate with an avg of 8Mb/sec, (max=8.3) , as you can see, one is virtually 50% behind the eight ball already. PD is a average consumer encoder and in my opinion subpar to several in the same price range or free. Good at editing features, poor at DVD HQ encoding.

I actually get much better DVD HQ quality by preproducing outside of PD a MPEG2 which I then use in the PD timeline for editing. If you keep within known bitrate guidelines, SVRT will be used when creating a DVD or DVD folder and only "edited" sections see a minor quaility degradation. Some are happy with PD DVD HQ encoding, I find it lacking in quality for the things I film.

Jeff

Thanks.

If I understood you correctly, you're saying that the big boys use clever encoding that can figure out what bit-rate is needed depending upon the contents of the scene; that brings the average bit-rate way down. PD9, on the other hand, just picks a rate and sticks to it.

I went and looked up SVRT, so I understand how you can sneak things through. Jerry Schwartz

Quote: If I understood you correctly, you're saying that the big boys use clever encoding that can figure out what bit-rate is needed depending upon the contents of the scene; that brings the average bit-rate way down. PD9, on the other hand, just picks a rate and sticks to it.

Yep.

Also keep in mind that 5Mb/sec bitrate on a commercial encoder is nothing like 5Mb/sec on a consumer encoder. Again, muliple $1000's to $100's in encoder technology so a tough comparison. In like PD6 days I took a piece of raw footage from a Canon mindv tape to a professional shop locally and had them capture/encode to DVD, I did the same in PD, nothing close in quality or resulting DVD size as one would expect.

Jeff