Rendering DV video to nero's H.264

[Quiddity]

Hi,
I'm using Sony Vegas to edit my home videos but I want to render the videos to Nero's H.264. Am I right in assuming that the only way to do this is by rendering my final video to DV format and then imputing my finalized DV footage into Nero's Recode? Will there be a loss in quality from rendering twice? Is there any easier way in going about doing this?

[Soopafresh]

You can use the DebugMode Frame Server app to render directly out of Vegas into your H264 encoder. H264 is a progressive codec, so you may have to deinterlace your footage for the best effect.

Another option MIGHT be to download X264 VFW, which is a flavor of h264, and directly render out of Vegas to an AVI with X264 as the codec.

[Quiddity]

Is it better to render H.264 as mp4 or as avi? Would it be more likely that future blueray and hd-dvd players will be able to play mp4 files rather than avi files?

[Quiddity]

anyone?

[celtic_druid]

Probably neither, but you can always remux the stream.
Nero does mp4, so I would leave it as is. Makes more sense than avi anyway.

For x264 I would still go with mp4.

h.264 specs support interlaced, not sure if Nero's public encoder does though. x264 definatly doesn't and probably won't for a long time.