Bitrate calculator questions
 

I have about 4 hours of bonus footage, about 36 different clips. I have a few questions about how to get them all appropriately put on a DVD.

1. Does a clips gig size affect what bitrate it should be compressed to? Example. Video A is 1440x1080 and is 50 gigs. If rendered from the video software at 720x540 instead, Video A is 13 gigs. Does it matter which one I compress to fit it on the DVD?

2. Do they make bit rate calculators that allow you to input a bunch of files and play with their rates? Some videos I don`t mind the quality taking a hit, others I want to look their best.

3. Yes I know I am crazy. But I am trying to give people their money`s worth :)

You should feed the highest quality available into your compression software. Either way, the settings that you make to encode into M2V will dictate what your final file size will be, not the source material.

You can download my company's bitrate calculator (free) if you need to convert between data denominations: eThree Media | BitRate Calc Version 2

On a somewhat different approach, 4 hours is just not going to work with any sort of acceptable quality on a single layer DVD, unless it is extremely low-motion and well-lit.

4 hours on a dual-layer DVD - that's much more within reach; 2 hours per layer, at a bitrate of apx. 4.8Kbps. This is probably OK for footage that isn't high motion or jerkily hand-held.

You do want a higher bitrate for high-motion, and, yes, you can play with higher bitrates for some clips and trade those off against lower bitrates for other clips.

I agree with Eric - the source file for your final encode should be the best resolution and quality you have available, up to the quality of the original footage.

Eric and Seth are both correct and I would encourage you to download the bitrate calculator. I use it occasional when I need to get a clip to less than 10 MB for e-mails. Great bit of kit, thanks Eric!

Simple and effective, I hope. Thanks, Shaun.

I will try it out. Thanks Eric. I did set the dvd up in Encore, but my brother did all the bitrate stuff. We got MOST of the footage looking good using the trade off of videos that can suffer loss get lower bit rate (such as interviews which are just people on a couch talking), trailers and other more visually important clips go higher. Hopefully I can recover the project file from Encore (hard drive crashed) and have a good base to start with. Thanks guys :)