Let me go on the record as being very pro Vegas Video. My only concerns have been with hardware compatibility and the proprietary codec. My video editing is done on a 1.6 GHz P4 with 768 Mb RAM, a 40 Gb software hdd, a 120 Gb video hdd, an ATI 8500DV all-in-wonder video card, an Edirol U5A audio interface, a 21" SVGA, a 27" NTSC Trinitron (both monitors are connected through the ATI card), an HP 200i external DVD+R/+RW burner, a GL2, ME66K6...

The hardware compatibility issues have been negligible as I have learned to work around the ATI video card & XP's need to automatically identify IE1394 devices. XP is often not sure whether it's the camera or the hard drive that is connected, but never both. This issue has been somewhat incidental, and it is probably ATI's fault.

My greater concern has been with the resolution of video played directly from an .avi file captured through Vegas' capture mode. I am presently using Vegas' codec, and the video looks good, but not great. What I have found is that once I encode in MPEG2 and burn a DVD, the footage looks awesome.

To my question: has anyone compared the codecs (codices) available to see if video quality is affected, and does anyone know why the details in my images are not really coming out until DVD production?

Thanks for your time.