Promoscape, a customer of ours (BrandB upgrade) contacted tech support after their initial results with MegaPEG HDTV did not meet their expectations. On the right you see the bitrate graphs of their first try with MegaPEG vs. BrandB. They took the standard PAL DVD 7.5 Mbits/s template and increased the bitrate to 8.6 Mbits/s and ran their tests.

As is customary for our technical support, I first had the customer upload the two respective MPEG-2 files to our FTP server. At that point, I performed a quick analysis of the two files using MPressionist Pro HD, and based on my analysis, noticed that BrandB was using a 9.8 Mbits/s peak bitrate, and so I requested the customer upload the source clip so we could design a custom template for them.

This chart shows the difference using our technical-support designed encoding parameters. The resulting file meets or exceeds the quality of the BrandB encoded file, but at 1/3 of the average bitrate. Yes, the BrandB file came out to 14 MB and the final MegaPEG file is 5.5 MB. Additionally, the MegaPEG encoded file spends far less time up in the 9.8 Mbits/s region. I have my doubts that the BrandB file complies with the DVD specification. Typically, professionally encoded DVDs have single peaks up to/over 9.8 Mbits/s, but in this case we find the first 5 GOPs all at the 9.8 Mbits/s maximum bitrate. To my way of thinking, this is exactly the advantage that MegaPEG's operator-assisted multi-pass encoding gives you. Instead of burning up 2/3 of your bit budget on 'automatic' bitrate allocation, you can eliminate wasted bits, which gives you more bits for difficult passages and/or more room on your disc for supplementary materials.

The resulting files are located here:
http://digigami.in-long-beach-ca.com/megapeg/brandb-vs-megapeg-DVD/

This project was encoded with our 3.2 Beta, which is available to all existing 'Batch' customers in the usual download location.