Blue ray will work at 1080 x 1920. If you use Lightroom or Photoshop you can resize them all in a batch

If I buy a Blu-Ray burner, could I not then render to an HD format in VMS and then burn an HD disk in DVDAS 5.0?

Of course. The lower resolution limitation only applies to DVDs.

Before you go out and purchase your Blu-Ray player, It is worthwhile to note that while your pictures maybe about 3000x2000, you will still only achieve 1920x1080 via the Blu-Ray method. The pictures will never be as crisp as you would like them to be, BUT they will be much better than the standard DVD resolution.

I'm not sure if its ever been discussed on the forum (no, I didn't search) but is it okay to let Movie Studio do the down rez or is it better to do it in a photo editor?

I am sure that practices differ among people.

We do know that:

- At least some versions of Movie Studio choke on some high res pictures in the timeline when rendering.

-Successive renders cause deterioration of the rendered clip

- Stills/photos that need to be pan/zoomed need higher resolution to allow for the technique and to avoid losing quality.

With that in mind, I would IMAGINE that it would be best to leave the photo resizing to Photoshop (or other photo editing software) and then place it in the timeline. So, think of it as a 2-render process. Of course, if you don't edit your pictures, you technically could add these large MP pictures to the timeline for a single 'render'

Having said that, if the photos are of suitable resolution (2x 1920x1080?) without pan/zoom, presumably Movie Studio know what to do with it since it already reducing the resolution? I haven't seen many reports of 'bad picture quality" in high def projects.

I typically bring my photos into the timeline at a resolution about 3-4 MP (down from about 16 MP in Photoshop) which is still above the 2.1 MP 1920x1080.HD format.

Good question! I would love to hear what others do.

"is it okay to let Movie Studio do the down rez or is it better to do it in a photo editor? "

There is no practical difference between Vegas and Photoshop in this respect, but if the downsized photos show moire or banding, a Lanczos 3 resizer can help, Irfanview also makes fast work of batch processing.

"Successive renders cause deterioration of the rendered clip"

If i may nitpick just a hair here ... nothing about rendering causes a clip to deteriorate or lose quality. Nothing, not ever. The clip is the clip is the clip, and it remains unchanged. The problem with the way you've stated it is that we've seen many users interpret it as rendering the same project over and over again causes quality loss, as in the old analog days when playing a tape too many times caused the signal to degrade from residual magnetism build up on the transport and mechanical wear on the tape. They end up feeling that it's critically important to get everything right the first time and render only once, because if they render a second time the second render will be worse than the first! This just doesn't happen in the digital world.

I know exactly what you're getting at, but the better way to say it is that each successive generation will have poorer quality than the previous one. Rendering the same project over and over again still results in only second generation output files. It's when you take that output file and use it as the source for a new render that you lose more quality. This is like the old analog problem of making many copies of the original which is fine, vs. making a copy of a copy of a copy ... etc. which results in quality loss each time.