Is there a maximum possible bitrate for h.264 (from DV iMovie)?

Question

Hello,
I have a DV file (a iMovie project) that is 8,76GB big. I want to burn it on a 8,5GB Dual Layer DVD. So I choose 23000kbit/s as video bitrate for h.264 (audio AAC 320kbit/s). The result was a file of 5,44GB (17Mbit/s). When I then tried 26000kbit/s the result was the same.
I the chose "best quality" and bitrate set to "automatic". The result was a 5,77GB file.
So, I wondered, if there is a limit in iMovieHD'05 for the bitrate chosen with h.264.
I have a very slow Mac, so I can't just test everything through, so here is my second question: would handbrake )last version for 10.5) be able to output a h.264 file with a bitrate of 23000kbit/s?
Another topic: I heard you can encode a DV file to mpeg2 with Toast Titanium, which I have. How do I do that, when I drop the VD file on it and choose compress and save as image, I get a video file of 8kb and an audio file of 4kb, when I open it and want to burn it, it starts compressing it again.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Karsten Schlüter wrote:
lime-iMacG3 wrote:
… since you can't tell iMovie to export the DV file as DV and use a smaller bitrate than the bitrate in the project, … I want to keep as much of the old bitrate as possible.
sure did iMHD5 export as DV!
That's its 'native' format, iMovie-a (≤v.6) was a dv-editor by concept.-
there is no 'smaller' bitrate in DV - dv is a very straight codec, by standard 13GBs/h - done.
and for sure you can save larger files than >4GB on a fat32 formated media - I'm doing so 'daily' some of my cheap sport-cameras use fat32-SDCards, recording 2h continously, creating a bunch of files.. on import, those files get 'consolidated' by the edit software.
again: just drag'n drop your precious material on a stick - done.
... it is less complicated than you make it think.
You did not understand the sentence iMovie does not export DV in smaller bitrates. That means, it exports DV, but only in the maximum bitrate of 57MBit/s (as told by QT, when you open a DV file, that you exported from iMovie).
Also, you must be using a System that can read FAT32+. FAT32 (without the "+") can only write up to 4GB. I use Tiger (10.4.11).
I did knew, that FAT32 can only take 4GB big files and I forgot and tried to copy a 9GB file once and it did not work, so I know for sure. Not just since this thread.
Is there any other way than drag and drop files in OS X (I do it that way since OS 9 in 2001)?
I am not as stupid as you make me feel think.
I read up on Toast again and there you can force Toast to fit a DVD file that is bigger than 8,5GB to a 8,5GB DVD. (I just did not want to let Toasts crappy compressor do it, but instead use h.264 for minimum quality loss, even if the human eye can't tell. The source is analog SD material btw.).