How much SD video on DVD before quality suffers too much

I realize this is a somewhat lame-brained question, so please bear with me. I've never gotten into encoding, but I'm doing a freebee for someone and I'm going to have to build the DVD for them. They want to put as much footage from a series of workshops onto one DVD, but not degrade the visual quality too much. The material will be originated in DV, shot on a PD150 and DSR-300. It will be well lighted and there will be little action. Basically someone sitting at a desk and an assistant demonstrating saxophone technique.

Can you give me a ballpark figure or point me to a paint-by-the-numbers source of information?

Thanks a bundle.

-Russ

its a multi-opinionated question but i never go over 4.20 on a dvd-5 if i can help it at all.
But that does not mean that it will fit. menus and all that take up space also.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Thanks much for the reply.

-Russ

Get yourself a bitrate calculator... look at the overall length of video that you are using, and type that into the tool, then set the kind of audio you are using and add that in too - the calculator will give you a ballpark figure which will get the footage onto the disc. However, it *wont* necessarily give you a nice looking result, as encoding is way too much like an art for that to happen!

Google 'bitrate calculator' and you'll find plenty.

You can go way over 4.5Mbps, depending on the length of the material you are using. The maximum for video bit rate is 9.8Mbps, however there is very little point going this high unless you know why you must. For replicated discs (i.e. those you send to a bureau to be made) you can go to 9.8. For anything that you make in your DVD burner, or a duplicator, keep the video bitrate down to no more than 7.5mbps or so, and make sure you use AC3 (Dolby Digital) audio, which has a far lower bitrate than PCM (or .aiff) audio.

Menu graphics, subtitles, ROM content and so on all have an impact, but it is tiny compared to the audio and video content. Remember - any menu graphics will be encoded to MPEG2 when the disc is built, so it doesn't matter what they were in Photoshop, they won't be that on the final product.