>Are they any benefits/drawbacks to internal vs external drives.

I have heard about problems with external firewire burners, but I have no first hand knowlege to impart on this. I personally have an internal Pioneer DVR-105(A05) it works flawlessly with Ulead MF2 and DVDlab. I would stick with an internal burner if possible because the MOBO interface doesn't normally have any latency problems which is sometime a problen with external burners and drives.

>I know that the Sony DRU-510A and Pioneer DVR-A05 and A06 drives are well respected. Now multiformat drives are coming out from other manufacturers. Are they any other I should consider?

I'm sort of biased to Pioneer but the Sony burner is a good one to. As I said above I have I hacve the A05 but would have probably gotten the A08 had it been around when I was in the market. You need to figure out your preference to -R or +R. I only do -R DVD's and have not had any problem in compatibility.

> haven't settled on my authoring app yet, so I am looking at which bundle is the best.

>As for other apps I prefer Nero to Roxio. Does anyone have Nero6? Is is worth it? How is the Veritas software that comes with the Sony?

I really like DVDlab 1.1. I use it for all DVD's I make and Ulead MF2 for SVCD's or non DVD footage that is going back to tape. I also have Nero 5 and use it to copy my DVD's from the DVD-rw to a DVD. I initially burn to a DVD-RW disk to "proof" the DVD for bloopers that I didn't see in Vegas. There are a lot of folks that use Nero to burn their DVD's.

I think for authoring, DVDlab is the best bang for the buck as it can give a good professional look to the menue and that is what I wanted. Are you using Vegas for capture and edit? If so, DVDlab has a very similar face to the Vegas Video layout or GUI as I believe it is called.