Any suggestions as to the best way to get this done while maintaining the best picture quality possible? I would like to go directly from DV-AVI to DVD-R but lack the knowhow to make this happen... Thanks in advance..
The short answer would be to use (a) TMPgenc (the lastest version) if you spend time to get to know this software it will NOT regret it, its very very cheap, and one of the best video tools around kinda legendary! (b)Or Cinema Craft Encoder SP if you have money to burn. (c) Some dedicated hardware encoder, as used by Hollywood pro's costing about $10K and upwards. Ok DV is digital video and if its miniDV then it has a bit rate of 25/Mbs compare that to mpeg2(uses in DVD's) has a maximum of 9.8/Mbs and you can see that you need to do some compression. The techniquies in transcdoing need alot of experimentation to get the desired results, beacuse you have to strike the right balance between file size and quality, i.e. getting the best picture within the right size. here are some factors for you to consider: How long is your film? the longer your film the more compression you will need. What type motion do you have involved? is it fast moving (i.e. action, sports, etc..) or somethig relatively slow paced such as say a news reader? Fast action requires higher bitrates to encode all the complextion motions/image where as slow motion will require a lower bitrate to encode. You may decide to use a constant bitrate, or you may decide to use a variable bitrate. A variable bitrate allthough more time consuming in terms of encoding generally handle video that has mixed motions (i.e some fast some slow) becasuse it will increase the bitrate where needed and lower bitrate where it is not needed. However the final file size is very difficult to estimate and could range any thing from your minimum bitrate setting to your maximum bitrate settings With VBR (variable BitRate) you well need to do multipass encoding / transcoding i.e more than one pass in order to fully utilise the full capacity of the VBR. (at least a two pass, and at most three pass, you can do more than three pass though the difference beyond three pass is debatable) Another thing is using such things as floating point DCT, and setting the DC presision to 10 bits, and also setting the motion seach to the highest quality. However putting all these settings to the highest quality will have a very big impact on time. The faster the CPU of yor computer is the faster you encoding. There are plenty of guides and software on this Website that should have you up and running in no time, and if you get stuck give us a shout! Anyway good Luck
