when it comes to bitrate and resolution im alittle iffy. I mean I've seen 640x480 videos at 200kbps and 1280x720 videos at 500kbps and im just not sure what's going on or how it actually works. How much is to much for which resolution, and how much is to little for which resolution etc. I just dont understand how it works and how big the difference is. I cant imagine the 1280x720 500kbps looking much better with a data rate of 4-5MB because the quality seemed like it was about as good as 720p gets.

Is there a data rate limit for true original uncompressed HD and DVD footage? I'm trying to figure out how to make sense out of what im actually encoding.

Example questions:

What would 320x240 look like at 10Mbps?
What would 720x480 look like at 512Kbps?

That's a difficult question, so many factors involved.

The short answer is 'do what looks best to you and still meets your bit rate needs'.

There're no firm rules I know of. I've seen excellent vids done at 120kbps and lousy ones at 9Mbps.

In general 2 pass average bitrate beats 1 pass constant bit rate. A motion vector detection setting of 20 or more is good too.

I've noticed the VP6 compression that China is going to use looks pretty good at low bit rates. It seems to distribute the compression distortion over a wider area on the video, avoiding the 'blocking' that MPEG creates.

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System - Athlon 1.4GHz, Win98, Hauppauge PVR250 receiver and compressor.
Software -Magix Movie Edit Pro 10, Nero 6 + NeroVision Express, Moho 4.61, PSP 8.1, Bryce, Quicktime 6.52 pro, Goldwave 5, DVD-Lab.
Cameras - Panasonic GS9, Canon ES8400V, Canon EOS D20 and Canon A70

ok but like, what's the lowest bitrate 720x480 DVDs use before it doesnt meet the standard anymore? What about 1280x720? I've seen data rates with Divx with 640x480 video with a rate as low as 200kbps and they looked pretty good, but I've never seen wmv videos with such a low data rate. Ontop of that, I still have yet to see a wmv video with a audio bitrate that was lower then the video data rate. Marc says im wrong, but i've looked and looked, even the videos they have on the windows media player site have huge audio bitrates.

Like this HD one im lookin at:

Bit Rate: 8447kbps
Data Rate: 8000Kbps

They are all like that and I want to know why it's just wmv and nothing else. Divx audio bitrates seem to be in the sane realm with the usual 128, 192, 320 or the uncompressed 1411. When I make a wmv video I select 128 as the audio bitrate, but in the properties it says something completely different.

4000 Kbps
You have an interesting perception of video quality...