LCPM OR DOLBY DIGITAL

grant99 · Post by **grant99** » Wed Apr 25, 2007 10:36 am

hi
all my capturing in vs10 is from DV, is it best to always pick dolby digital as audio as this is more compressed?
cheers grant

daniel · Post by **daniel** » Wed Apr 25, 2007 11:16 am

capture in LPCM and use Dolby later when rendering.

Like all lossy compression steps, it's best to leave them until the last moment because you throw out data after you have (hypothetically) modified it.

DVDDoug · Post by **DVDDoug** » Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:25 pm

is it best to always pick dolby digital as audio as this is more compressed?

Usually... The audio compression means there is more room for the video. So, with compressed audio you can use a higher video-bitrate for higher quality video.

With a short video (less than an hour) you should be able to get-away with LPCM, but if you put squeeze 2 or more hours of video and LPCM on a single-layer DVD, you are very likely to notice the loss of video quality. ...At some point, the uncompressed audio takes-up so much room that there is no room for the video!

Of course Dolby AC3 is lossy compression, so uncompressed LPCM is better quality. But Dolby audio sounds quite good to me, and I'm actually more picky about audio quality than I am about video quality.

And, the only standard-compliant way to put digital surround sound on a video-DVD is with Dolby! (It can be done with DTS too, but the standard does not required all players to have a DTS decoder.)