Exporting to DVD for Encore

Question

Hi all, I have been doing a lot of reading and have been trying to resist making a new topic, but I think I can't help it anymore, so here it goes.
I previously got a crash course in exporting from within Premiere to Encore here - http://forums.adobe.com/thread/857030
I used workflow 1 and reported getting good results. That project was under an hour. I am now dealing with wedding videos that go on past an hour and would like some more help, if possibly, though I think I have managed to stumble my way through quite a bit.
The footage being used is DSLR at full 1920x1080 and I simply exported to MPEG-2 DVD using "Match Source Attributes (High Quality)" from the dropdown menu.
I then checked "Use Max Render Quality" and after 9+ hours I got a final product. When I looked at it in Encore, however, I found the results to be less than favorable. Text seemed to be blocky and skimming through, some things seemed pixelated.
I was really discouraged by this but decided to burn it and test anyway. Results were not AS bad as I thought, and I figure there may have been an issue looking at the DVD resolution video on my 1080 monitor. Things are bound to look ugly.
So the footage does not look too bad, I think the average Joe won't complain much. I did notice some areas where there was a bit of flicker, like say, intricate wickar furniture.
Question 1: Am I to assume that this is on account of the bitrate and how it was budgeted?
My minimum bitrate was 2.8.
Max was 7 and target was 5.
The entire film (wedding) is an hour and ten minutes and with those settings it says the output would be 3292MB - and the audio and video file came up to  3.21GB (duh)
Question 2: Can I adjust some settings to maybe bump up the file size? Since I have a 4.7GB DVD disc to play with, can I not make the overall file be close to the capacity and get even higher quality video? How best should I do this?
Question 3: What should I be selecting for Pixel Aspect Ratio? 16:9 or 4:3, considering it is DSLR footage going to SD DVD?
Question 4: If I want to add things like extra features, or, full speeches, I am guessing I should just do a 2nd disc? For future reference.
I appreciate any input that can be given, and since all my searching on the forums didn't find these specific questions (assuming I'm not just bad at searching) maybe others will get some help out of this as well in future.

Answer 1

I never tried the DL discs because of compatibility issues I read about, but with the much greater cost, and the volume of discs I do, did not care to go that direction anyway. As for MPEG-2 encoders out there, everyone has their favorites and their opinions, and I'm not going to name any, as this is the Adobe forum. I do generally use AME myself, but have "Option B" for certain specialty jobs, but is a VERY complicated workflow. Involves several pieces of public domain software.
As for CBR vs. VBR encoding, you'll get all kinds of opinions on that. For years, I authored with a third-party DVD tool that did not like importing VBR files, so I stuck with CBR all the time, and now that I am authoring in Encore...old habits die hard. I have my reasons for using CBR for most jobs still. I like to think that encoding at 6 or 7 looks pretty good, so...why not encode ALL of your footage at 7? Why encode some scenes at the low end of say 4, when ALL the footage could be 7? So I like to stick with CBR except for low data rate jobs where extra bit management will show a tangible benefit. I've also seen "break up" of the image with VBR when hitting sudden channges, like photo flashes at wedding receptions, where the data rate spikes from min to max with VBR - don't see this issue with CBR. Probably depends on the player to an extent. The guy who encodes everything at 10 has to be rolling his eyes at me right now ;-)
About the two hour projects - if you are talking about starting with an HD source, then getting a nice result on DVD is difficult at any bitrate! It has to do with scaling issues, and is especially problematic with interlaced footage because you are not just scaling, but flipping from Upper Field to Lower Field interlacing as well and things just go bad. Not singling out Adobe - I don't know if ANY NLE really nails it, just Google it, it's a problem all around the industry. We all though that shooting in HD would automagically result in nicer DVDs, but my old DV-sourced DVDs look better.
Adobe recommends using the "Maximum Render Quality" setting in AME when scaling (HD to SD), but then I see other posts saying that CUDA rendering with an Nvidia card will actually do better, so leave Max Render off if you have Nvidia...makes my head hurt.
When I figure it all out, will let you know! I've been making DVDs for over 10 years, and only ran into quality issues when I started shooting HD. Seems that setting the DVD encode to PROGRESSIVE may help when encoding from HD material, takes interlacing out of the picture. Still working on that.
As for the 560 formula, got that right from the Adobe site a while back. It's just the number that works. Think about it - reverse engineer and multiply the optimal data rate that will fit a 4.7GB disc times minutes, and it is 560! 6.22x90=558. 4.66x120=559 and so on.
When I talk about delivering two-hour DVDs to my customers, this is different than say doing a concert video or indie film for national distribution. My wedding, dance recital and stage play customers think the DVDs look great. A TV critic might diagree. Just consider that the average young person is now VERY used to watching YouTube garbage, so they wouldn't know quality if it bit them in the backside! Compression is what they are used to.
Jeff