Hi, everyone, I am transfering several VHS and Hi8 tapes to DVD. Normally they are 2 hours and I use 4.5M for video and 384K for audio when I encode them using TMPGEnc Plus, and I can put 2 hrs in one dvd. My: 1) is this bitrate too low? 2) if yes, what is a suggested bitrate for encoding when transfer from VHS/Hi8 tapes to DVD? Thanks in advance.
Because of the basic (lack of) quality of VHS, 4000kbps video is usually good. Your 4.5 may be a bit high, but it's still good. You can't increase the quality by increasing the bitrate. 384k audio is probably too much, unless it's a really good stereo track to begin with. 224k is usually lots, and I doubt your ears can tell the difference. (this is for direct capturing to mpeg-2 using a hardware card). A lot of the quality comes from your capture process, software, type of card, and compression used, and without knowing those...
I usually select my Bitrate baced on how long of a video i am going to put on a DVD so I can Maximize the Quality and the Space on the DVD as Opposed to useing an Arbitrary number.... Also the Bitrate you use to encode is sometimes determined by the Quality of the Source File..If the Source File is of a Super High Quality then it will take Less Bitrate to encode it to an acceptable Quality but if the Video is Low Quality with lots of Noise then it will take a higher Bitrate to encode it to an acceptable quality compared to the Sources quality... Like when Backing Up DVD"s I can use a Bitrate as Low as 3000kbs and Still produce very Good results and be able to fit 2 full DVD Movies on a Single DVD-R..When Doing a VHS Backup to DVD I will sometimes have to use a Encodeing Bitrate over 5000kbs to achive good Quality.... The Frame rate and Resolution are also other factors that can effect what the optimal bitrate would be as well as what encoder you are useing as Some Encoders Can achieve Much better quality than other encoders while useing a Much Lower Bitrate...... Cheers
just do a 1pass CQ 85 at 9000kbps and cross your fingers. its faster than 2 pass. or you could try QuEnc, and do a constant quantizer 2. its much faster than tmpg, from my observation, so 2 pass isn't too bad.
