Question on Resolution and DVD Encoding

[mrwhitethc]

I've been doing DVD backups all manor of ways, either one click or the long way thanks to the handy guides provided by Doom9, Trilight and 2Cool. My question is this sometimes I feel that the bit rate would drop too low on something and wonder if encoding it at SVCD res would be best. I mean SVCD states 2500kbps so if it's around that wouldn't it look fantastic? But the 4 important questions I have to ask are what if you did all the extras at 352x480, and is there any easy way to accomplish this, shouldn't this improve the quality with a lower bit rate, if 480x480 is decided as best would the 9000kpbs max that DoCCE4U hinder quality in the long run, finally since I do have my eye on a big screen or DLP projector would any of these really help or is 740x480 still better even at lower kpbs than 480x480?

Sorry for all the questions just been wondering these for awhile, also asked this in the General Forum awhile back and didn't get a response hopefully this time I will.

[adam]

The only compliant DVD resolutions are 720x480/576, 704x480/576, 352x480/576, and 352x240/288. So instead of using 480x480 you'd have to go with 352x480, which is fairly close.

The only true answer I can give to your question is that you will just have to see for yourself. Everything has a trade off. By decreasing resolution you lose sharpness and fine details in your picture. At lower bitrates, you will have less artifacts though. You basically need to find the best compromise between bitrate and resolution to achieve an adequate bits per pixel ratio, which is a fairly accurate measure of "quality."

In my opinion, if your bitrate is in the 2-2.5mbit range than you should most definitely resize down to 352x480. The image will be much cleaner and for most extra's, which usually aren't all that sharp or detailed anyway, the resolution difference won't be very noticable.

In my opinion, video encoded at 720x480 with a bitrate of 2.5mbits looks noticably worse than the same video encoded at 352x480 with a bitrate of 2.5mbits.

Some may think my methods are a bit extreme, but unless the movie is relatively short, I encode all of my extras at 352x240 with a bitrate of 1mbit. I use a decent amount of noise reduction to make the image more compressible, and I get quality which is slightly better than VCD. Extras are typically very compressible (most are a guy sitting in front of a curtain backdrop) so they are still very watchable at this low res and bitrate. Using these settings, my extras hardly take up any space, and I am free to use a much higher bitrate for my movie.

Its very easy to resize your extras. Just use the AVS editor in DoItFast4u and add the resize line. Extra's are usually interlaced, so I have my IVTC AVS setting setup to add noise reduction and resize to 352x240. Most of the time I can just set my assets accordingly, occasionally I have to go back and manually edit the AVS scripts for pprogressive extra's.