rendering question

[YOURCONNEXX]

i record video with my camcorder (sony handy cam hc 46) then capture it with sony vegas 8.0 .... when its done capturing...... all the clips are avi's and, for example, may all equal say 2.5 gigs of video.... ok thats cool ... so i put them on the sony vegas timeline .... i dont edit them at all.... i may even add a title screen or whatever... but when i go to render them to dvd ntsc vegas cuts the file size down dramatically and its less clear than the avi files... is there anyway or anything im missing that can keep the quality high... one video i rendered went from 2.5 gigs (avi) all the way down to 836mb (mpeg2) why cant it stay high quality ???

[redwudz]

You can increase the bitrate they are encoded to in the MPEG-2 format. That will increase the quality. Look for those settings in Vegas. You should be able to go up to about 9800 kbps for the video. You can drop one of the VOBs that Vegas created into Gspot to see what bitrate they were encoded to.

[minidv2dvd]

use windv to capture as type 2 DVavi. i don't know what type of avi you have been capturing to, but DVavi is the same as what's on the tape. then use those files in vegas to edit and render. dvd mpeg-2 has a maximum bitrate of around 10mbps total with audio, so be on the safe side use a cbr of 8-9mbps (depending on your audio format and bitrate) when you render along with setting the encoder to highest quality, and closed gops. you shouldn't notice much difference from the original.