Poor DVD Rendering Quality

[basic flair]

I've edited video for my dad from our Hawaii vacation in Vegas 8.0. The project initially is setup in HD 1080-24p but I've found the video to glitch like insanity when rendered. I changed the project settings and tried HDV 1080-24p, HDV 720-24p but I get the same poor results. The original project media is 29.970 fps interlaced, 1440x1080x32, AVC.

I've brought the template down to NTSC DV Widescreen (720x480). The video looks fantastic on my computer when I render it as MPEG-2 but still is not high enough quality when burned onto a DVD (using DVD Architect Pro 5.0). The stills look like there are ants crawling over the picture and I'll get an occasional pixelation.

I've pre-rendered some clips within a section to try and help lighten the load.

This is my first project so I expected to run into a few walls.

What am I doing wrong?
Is there anything I can do to produce this film on my own machine?

[guns1inger]

Don't use the default settings for mpeg-2 rendering in Vegas, as they are too low in most instances. After choosing a template, click Custom and up the bitrate to 8700000