I am making the simplest kind of Blu-ray disc in Encore for the first time. The only variable is the Max Audio/Video Bitrate from 15 Mbps to 40 Mbps. What setting do you advise ? My project in CS5 was filmed in 1920x1080 25p. It's 30 mins long.I have tried both 15 Mbps and 25 Mbps which seem OK but could I go higher ? Cheers.

Bitrate allocation is always subjective, but since you're working with only 30 minutes of project, i personally believe that ramping up the bitrate to max is not any more beneficial..

H.264 is such an effecient codec, that the only factor at this point would be the quality of your original material.

I always render in H.264 with a variable bitrate of 30 MBit/sec, if I have enough space free on the disk. Less is fine for most footage. If you have handheld footage or much moving elements in the image then keep it close to 30 or 32 MBit...

Thanks.Yes I do use H.264. I have noticed that although I set the Maximum Bitrate to 25 Mbps when I play the disc on the PC the information shows the Bitrate to be well under 25 - more like 9 or 10..

Try this online bitrate calculator for Blu-ray discs. Works for me.

DVD-HQ : Bitrate & GOP calculator (http://dvd-hq.info/bitrate_calculator.php)

John

Like Peter said, it's mostly subjective. If you're shooting a lot of interview content, 15Mbps 2-pass VBR would do since most of the content is a static frame with low motion. If you're shooting sports, that's when the extra bitrate comes in handy and you might want to consider 30-35Mbps VBR 2 pass at Maximum Render Quality.

If your source is NanoFlash files however, there will be a noticeable difference in higher bitrate encodings as compared to using EX source material.

Thanks Jack. That's really clear and helpful.