a burning question: bit rate control

[pboss]

I read through the manual of 11+ but don't see it stipulated, so here's my question (prior to purchase...)

Can I control the bit rate when burning to a standard DVD? I think the usual ceiling in mpeg2 is about 10Kbps before trouble starts with reading, but I am interested to get close to that. Can I?

thx!

[heinz-oz]

Yes, you have control over the bitrate used to encode, both CBR and VBR.

10 Mbps is a bit high. Usually pressed original DVDs may peak around that but on an average level are a lot lower. Burned DVDs, peaking at around 9 Mbps combined (video and audio bit rate) have been known to make some players choke.

[MrA]

Actually, it's about 8k.. Personal experince with my hardware, I am good at 6k..

[heinz-oz]

As I said, at 9 Mbps, many players choke

I usually have mine at around 6 Mbps but the duration of my videos are around 1 hour usually. If I had longer durations to fit, I would go lower than that. I had very good results even at 4500 kbps from a DV-Avi source.

[Ken Berry]

You certainly can. In fact controlling the bitrate is central to video editing and authoring. Generally we recommend not going higher than 8000 kbps. The 10,000 kbps you mention is a tad on the high side, and it was probably also meant to include the audio bitrate used. But many (most?) home DVD players have difficulty with video burned with too high a bitrate and 8000 kbps seems to be a safe upper limit which still gives excellent quality.

A video bitrate of 8000 kbps will allow around one hour of high quality video (DVD compatible mpeg-2) to be burned to a single layer DVD (4.3 GB) using standard high quality LPCM audio. LPCM, however, produces large files in its own right, so if you want to squeeze another 10 minutes or so of video onto the disc, use a more highly compressed/smaller file size audio codec like mpeg layer 2 or Dolby AC-3. A video bitrate of 6000 kbps will allow around 90 minutes to be burned to the same disc (and a bit more with those alternative audio codecs); and 4000 kbps will allow 2 hours of average quality video to be burned, or again a bit more depending on the audio codec.

Briefly, you can set the desired bitrate right from the beginning of the process in the project properties. And after editing, if you follow our recommended procedure, you will convert your project to a DVD compatible mpeg-2. Here you have another place where you can vary the bitrate if you want or maintain the project bitrate.

Then when you have the mpeg-2, you open the burning module where you can have a third bite at the cherry if you want. Normally by this stage it is desirable to have already established the end bitrate during the editing phase. But if for some reason you have inserted video into the burning timeline which is, say, going to be too big for the DVD, then in the second of the three icons in the bottom left of the burning screen (Project Settings), there is a box where you can vary things like the bitrate which will be included in the burn.

Otherwise, we recommend you leave that alone and tick the box below that properties window, which says 'Do not convert compliant mpeg files'. If you have already produced a DVD compatible mepg-2, you want to avoid as far as possible another conversion to a different bitrate at this stage because recodes of mpeg-2 involve a loss of quality since mpeg-2 is a lossy format.

[pboss]

Wow! - I am overwhelmed by the rapid and complete response from all. I posted 3 notes on a 'competitor' forum about similar questions and got no replies - this cinches the deal - thanks again!

[Black Lab]

That is one of the reasons I went with VS years ago. The level of participation amazed me back then, and it still does today.