Need help with HDV / SD DVD (field dom. and bitrate)

[Joe Holden]

I have been pulling my hair out with a 129 minute instructional DVD shot on a Sony A1u (1080i60 - 16:9) - captured and edited in HDV, straight from the camera. I will not attempt to ask all of the quality questions for which there do not seem to be agreed upon answers, but I have three specific questions:

1) In compressor, should I have field dominance "same as source" (upper I believe in the case of HDV) - this is what compressor defaults to, or should I change it to lower dominance, as it will be going onto a DVD.

2) If I am outputting to DDP 2.0, rather than a DVD-R for the replicator (going on a DVD9), should I still follow the conventional wisdom and peak out at ~7.5 Mbps or go closer to what would fit, 8ish? (I have seen posts from repected members of various forums saying that when going to a replicator the bitrate is not as much an issue)

3) Because I can afford (bitwise) to do 7-8 Mbps, is there any good reason not to set it to that and go CBR (I am crunched for time AND have had nasties in my footage in the compression step going HDV->SD DVD via VBR)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated - this is the first project that I have a real stake in reputation-wise and I am sweating it!

Thanks,

Joe

[Ervin Farkas]

1. MPEG2 for DVD is upper field first indeed.

2. I would stay with 7.5 Mbps max - there is not much to gain going higher, but there is a lot to loose if clients complain.

3. At that high of a bitrate you should be OK with CBR - it all depends on the software used for encoding. I've seen action packed movies encoded at 4 Mbps without a flaw.