HD to SD Highest Bitrate reliably used

OK so I have this client who had me shoot, edit and present in HD 1920x1080, The project looks so gooood. Now they say OK, looks great...we need a Standard Def DVD to project at our Luncheon, AARRGGG1! I downres, show them the final DVD and they of course say Wow I had no idea it would look this bad on the downres. I edited in a prores HD seq, exported a SD Prores QT, converted to Mpeg2 in Compressor bitrate at 6.0 2pass.

It's not the worst looking...but a far cry from the original HD.

My question is what is the highest bitrate you can compress an SD DVD to and still expect not to playback problems for the masses of DVD's.

They are duplicating a 1000 copies for the attendees and will be playing it back in SD to the projectors.

Thanks

Eroc

> I edited in a prores HD seq, exported a SD Prores QT

Why? Just send the original HD movie file through Compressor.


www.derekmok.com

Yeah you would think, but the text has rastoring around it, it looks like the the whole thing is like 36 dpi res. I resolved the text issue with the scale down exporting the SD file then taking to compressor. I have alway heard rumors about older DVD player being limited in the ability to playback DVD compressed with higher bit rates so I have alway stuck to 6.2 as my highest rate and it ussually looks ok.

But after shooting, presenting in Hidef I want this 8 minute video to looks it's best in low def (SD)

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