High bitrate WMV to MPEG2?

Hello!

I mainly use MM2 to make pal DVD movies (burned on CD -MiniDVD- or on DVD).
The raw material comes form a pal DV cam.

Untill now, I save to pal DV-AVI and then encode to MPEG2 with TMPGEnc. On
my computer, the pal DV-AVI file produced by MM2 has problems in it (skips
in audio a the beginning and end of transitions and strange video flow
during transitions especially noticable on TV). I could never solve these
problems (I suppose they may be system-related as other users don't report
them).

Theses problems do not appear in WMV files produced by MM2, so I wonder if
it would be a good solution to save to WMV instaed of DV-AVI, and then
encode to MPEG2. The standard profiles for WMV in MM2 are limited to 2.1
kbps. Of course, I will loose a lot of quality saving to a 2.1 kbps WMV file
and encoding it to a 8kbps MPEG2 file!

So I envisage to install Windows Media Encoder, in order to create a custom
profile for MM2, allowing me to save a WMV file with the maximum possible
bitrate (minimum possible compression).

My questions:
1) What is the maximum possible bitrate in Windows Media Encoder. Is there a
sort of "uncompressed" WMV file possibility?
2) Am I right to suppose that encoding an highest possible bitrate WMV file
to MPEG2 will result in a quality level comparable to an uncompressed DV-AVI
file encoded to MPEG2?
3) Do you have other suggestions?

I would greatly appreciate your comments on that. Thank you in advance.

Michel