Best, High or Professional?

My question tonight is about encoding. When I'm in iDVD and I am setting the encoding level to create my Disk Image file, my options are: Best Performance, High Quality or Professional Quality. I've been choosing "Professional Quality" because I want my movie to look and sound as good as possible. Is this the right choice? The quality color scale changes depending on which grade I've chosen - "Best Performance" is mostly green, "High Quality" has some red along with the green, and "Professional Quality" is mostly green and yellow. What do these changing colors indicate?
Thanks in advance for your answers.
Diana

Diana Sedenquist wrote:
.. Karsten, I didn't think about consulting the iDVD forum because I ALWAYS bring my questions here. But point taken. : )
< voice of grumpy ol' man > .. and anybody else with the same prob/Q/interest doesn't find the answers.. don't hesitate to establish your own discussions.sedenquist.com boards ..
.. Best Performance turns the color bar green. High Quality turns the color bar green, yellow, orange, and red, and Professional Quality turns the color bar green, lime, and yellow. What's that all about?
I don't own the book of Mr Pogue, in my Missing Manual, the explanation is quite simple:
same project, 3 settings:
• BP - does NOT mean, the disk will 'perform best', but the encoding process ...- using a CBR (please wiki your own...) allows a good mixture of 'picture quality' vs. 'encoding times'. because of the fix, constant bitrate, project-length is limited to 60min, therefor encoding can happen in the background...
• HQ - does mean, the disk will show a high(er) quality.. using VBR; varying the bitrate allows 'more' content (=to the price of lower pic quality) and process affords so much computation, background rendering is switched-off ...
now, here comes the color:
depending on LENGTH, the bitrate varies.. benchmarks are <60, <90, <120min .. 9/6/4Mbit/sec as max. bitrate..
depending on other content (menus, dvd-rom section) iDVD has to 'crunch' even more ..
• PQ - don't know much about the new encoding option, afaik, using a 2pass/VBR, which allows to analyze the content first, then to 'decide' where which bitrate (=for optimal use of disk space), finally encode.
summary:
color indicates pic quality
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iDVD/7.0/en/11417.html

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Message was edited by: TheWillis

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