I know this is a basic question. So basic in fact that try as I have to find the answer on the web I can’t because all the thousands of hits I get all seem to assume the reader already knows the answer.
An edit house is converting my 51min. Betacam tape to a 120min DVD-R disc. What speed should they use for giving the best quality result? (They tried it once at SP and there are some noticable “anomolies” in the end product.) I’m pretty sure there is a faster speed that gives a higher quality. If so, what is it?
Um, I’m not sure your question makes sense. What matters is what speed your tape was originally recorded at. There is no such thing as SP, EP, SLP speeds for DVD unless you’re referring to the bitrate at which the digital video file is to be encoded.
If that’s the case, then the higher the bitrate, the better. You should have no problem maximizing your bitrate if your video is only 51min long. I believe that the maximum bitrate for DVD format MPEG2 video is 9.1 Mbits/second.
Of course, there are other factors that affect video quality such as the quality of your source, whether it is interlaced or progressive, whether the video format PAL or NTSC. The “noticeable anomolies” may or may not be compression artifacts that can be minimized with a faster bitrate or the judicious application of various video filters.
XP (and maybe FP) was what I was looking for. I was watching the technician when he made the dub. There was a menu of speeds. He picked the standard speed, but I saw there was a “faster” (higher quality) one.