Re: HDV to SD - DVD

[Grant Strac] "I have three mac's I edit with but my main machine is MacPro 8 core Intel 22gb ram 4 2tb drives. It is set up with four boots. One with lion for my personal use & fcs x, one boot with leopard fsc 1, one with snow leopard for fcs 2, and lion for fcs3. This is for all my clients. But I have old iMac and year old MBP which both handle my work as well.

Also I would disagree with your statement about VBR and GOP. I have never heard or had top cause issues with dvd players. GOP is something specifically designed for dvd only. Ever since I was taught by Apple Master Trainer to do what I said to do four years ago I have never had issue. Gop is important because the smaller it is the more information put on each frame. If you have 10 i frames in the encode or 100 that means it will have all the information on 100 frames rather than half the information over a large top structure. It doesn't add much size it just means that many more frames have full information it needs.

Gop is IpppbI then only two frames have full information in that frame then the encoder "fudges" the information between the I's and there is half or less information in that gap. Bad analogy but best way to explain without the full details. If you have IpbI successively then more quality

Your comment about cbr or vbr is almost correct. I didn't even mention it as advice because it's minuscule difference between the two. In either selection you still get high bit rate one just decides that in less image intensive sections to put less information so it has more room for the image intensive scenes. It automatically chooses how much information to put into the frames that need more than others, like a fade in & out will be less so the next scene can have more. This way you save space on disc. But he needed advice to preserve quality and these details will add more quality but insignificant to his needs. I do appreciate your insight.
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thanks Grant, this stuff really belongs on the DVDSP forum, however, lets go on.
22GB of RAM is above most editors, what are the minimum specs that you have tried this on, your other machines? I would suspect that RAM is the limiting factor.
If we are talking replication (molded discs) the bit-rate can be close to the maximum limit, it's a matter of reflectivity. If you're producing in this realm VBR in Compressor is going to spike, CBR not.
now if you talking CinemaCraft...
Fiddling with GOP among other things, is also going to present space problems, and your bit-rate calculator is not your friend anymore, making coasters and eventually going to DVD9s (dual layer)

Cheers
Alexander