Actually, I happen to be faced with this same problem on an urgent project-- so any help is much appreciated. If you render to something less than 1024x768 and let the media player "stretch" it out to full screen, the avi will not be pristine.

How can I render out to 1024x768? It seems to limit me to a max of 800x600.

Thanks,
Jeff

Neither of you seem to understand. Since you are going to project something from a PC via a projector what you want to do is use the highest bitrate for the render and not overly concern yourself about frame size. Then do as HeeHee suggested. You could either use AVI and the default template getting 720 x 480 which would generate a huge file (and take forever to render) depending on the size of your project or just render to DV using either the NTSC or PAL template, again at 720 x 480.

In case you didn't know, when you burn a DVD it stretches out to fill the TV screen. Same thing happens when you view a movie in a theater or when you took those old super 8 movies (maybe before your time). You didn't think that StarWars or Harry Potter was filmed at some giant sized frame size that matches the mega screen sizes common today did you? No of course not.

We do this all the time with out 1024x768 projector. Render to a standard size like 640x480 and it will look fine when projected. You won't be able to tell that it's been stretched. Even 320x240 files look passable. Changes in the temporal dimension completely overshadow any spatial resolution effects. In simpler words, the fact that the video changes from frame to frame means more to the eye than the pixels do. Ever notice how the hair on the model in shampoo commercials seems to have every individual strand visible and sharply defined as she turns her head? Obviously the television doesn't have enough resolution to show that, but the movement fools your eye into thinking it sees it.

As far as worrying about it being pristine ... is your source 1024x768? If not, then you'd be stretching it if you could render to 1024x768 and it wouldn't be pristine then either. Trust us ... don't worry about it. Try it and you'll see that it looks fine.

Ok,
I see the confusion here. I guess jgourd and I have slightly different problems. I don't need to project this stuff. I am producing a multimedia demo of a software product. It consists mostly of avi screen captures (by Camtasia) at 1024x768 screen size.

Vegas does the best job I've seen of squishing this down to 800x600 without distorting the text / image quality too badly-- but it's still not pristine. It is possible to use the pan/zoom tools to see pristine 800x600 parts of the capture, but I really want to play the finished video back at 1024x768 so the whole thing is visible and pristine.

The software application I am recording needs at least 1024x768, so I can't just record it at 800x600.

Playback for the finished project is on a computer monitor.

Any reason why there would be an 800x600 limit???? Any way around it?

Thanks,
Jeff