Encoding Settings for Film Festival - Suggestions Needed

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Peckhammer

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My recent mini-doc is an official selection for a film festival. They want two DVDs for showing at the event. I can make the DVDs with Encore, but how should I encode it for maximum quality? It's HDV, 16:9, and about 8 minutes in length and edited with CS5. I typically use the Adobe media encoder that comes with CS5. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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Peckhammer
 
An '.mov' file is not a standard DVD format. Hence, for 'ease' of use, I'd recommend using Encore to make an official DVD. As such, the max bit rate for DVD is about 9 mbs (and some change...) which includes both audio and video bitstreams. Setting your video bitrate max to about 8 mbs will give you the 'best' quality bitrate wise for DVD. When I make fest submissions, I play the resulting DVD on several different players just to make sure that I have not created something that just works on one device...

Setting the video bitrate to 7 mbs will perhaps maintain the same human perception of quality, but be less likely to cause a hiccup on 'any old player'...

The other parameter that I think is tweekable in Encore, is the use of Variable Bit Rate (VBR) or Constant Bit Rate (CBR). The problem with VBR is one has to set the max bit rate so that there will be no spikes which could exceed the DVD spec.

For 8 minutes... hight CBR may be better for speed to produce...
 
+1. The problem with DVDs is that some players won't read a DVD at max spec. The "safety play" is to hold the video bitrate to 7 mbs, which just about any old DVD player can read. If you can access the players they'll actually use, you could try several variations, up to and including the maximum bit rate that's legal for a DVD. Let 'em have the ones with the highest bit rate that will work with their player.

+1 also for CBR on an eight minute short. At eight minutes you're not looking at a file size problem, and CBR is easier for the old players to deal with too.
 
+1. The problem with DVDs is that some players won't read a DVD at max spec. The "safety play" is to hold the video bitrate to 7 mbs.
Click to expand...

Oh, not this nonsense again.

ALL DVD players bearing the DVD logo (meaning built to DVD specifications and not some Chinese fake) can play disks up to the maximum specified bitrate. They have to. The problem is error correction. If the player can't read a sector on the DVD, it'll try again. If those tries go beyond what's in the buffer, the playback stream stops briefly.

The solution isn't to limit your bitrate to some artificial rate. The solution is to produce DVDs with as few errors as possible, using a format the player likes. This means three things:

1. Use high quality media. Falcon Pro are probably the best on the planet, better than Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden. In fact, my Falcon Pro burns have fewer errors than most of the Hollywood DVDs I own.
2. Use a good quality burner. Sony/NEC (Optiarc) consistently produce some of the best burns on the market.
3. If your player works better with +R than -R, go with that.

1 and 2 are easy for broad compatibility. For 3, I recommend starting out using -R single layer disks, and +R dual layer disks. Only if one comes back as unplayable (which is highly unlikely if 1 and 2 have been done), then you'd switch to another format.
 
Honestly the easiest way to get a DVD from your Premiere timeline is to simply import the project (actually the sequence) into Encore and let Encore figure out what's best for your DVD. I've never had a problem with this way and unless you have altered the default render settings in Encore than you'll be AOK.
 
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