SmartRender is your friend.... and unfortunately Vegas does not have it. I'm pretty new to vegas... coming from Liquid, which DOES have smartrender. Switched over to vegas for now anyway because the present version of liquid is so full of bugs it's not funny.

But at anyrate... smartrender is a system that allows only the parts that require rendering to actually be done... the rest just simply gets passed on through to the next stage. In other words, the only parts to get rendered are pretty much the parts that you change while editing... as wellas any other parts that you make some kind of change to. This goes a long way to preserving the original quality... It also DRASTICALY speeds up render time.

I am HOPING Sony changes this for the next version... I'm beggining to like this vegas thing and kind of wanna stay here... but smartrender is too good a deal to pass up If I don't see a smartrender system from sony on next version, I'm afraid I will have to return to liquid!

Pretty well all of the other known editors have it now... Studio... Liquid.... ALL of the Ulead products. Sony is one of the fast shrinking handful that doesn't.

ARE YOU LISTENING SONY.... HINT, HINT

I've pretty much settled on using the cineform connectHD software. I have been getting consistently good results with HDLink and importing the CFHD avi files into vegas...no softening. In fact, my meg2 rendered video is surprisingly good.

Sidecar2
Is the higher quality video from the Z1 coming from recorded HDV tapes or while watching a live feed straight from the Z1 itself? The tape will always be HDV compressed while the live feed is not compressed. This could explain some of the quality differences you are seeing if it is the live feed you were referring to.

Sidecar2, instead of archiving back to tape, why don't you archive to hard drives which are very cheap these days and much more accessible. This is what I'm doing very successfully:

1. Cut up my video on the timeline
2. Use a slightly customised version of Jonnyroy's WombleExport.cs script to output a Womble TLS file
3. Import the tls file into Womble MPEG Video Wizard
4. Export the trimmed files from Womble MVW to your hard drive

The trimmed files are smart rendered (i.e. no quality loss). Only the very ends are re-rendered if necessary. And they are much smaller than your AVI options. The only downside is that I don't think the m2t files can be written back to tape, but I don't care about that as I'll never deliver those files on tape anyway.

"But at anyrate... smartrender is a system that allows only the parts that require rendering to actually be done... the rest just simply gets passed on through to the next stage. In other words, the only parts to get rendered are pretty much the parts that you change while editing... as wellas any other parts that you make some kind of change to. This goes a long way to preserving the original quality... It also DRASTICALY speeds up render time."

Vegas does this with AVI files. If you don't change anything the unedited frames are just copied to the target file.

"Vegas does this with AVI files. If you don't change anything the unedited frames are just copied to the target file."

Well, this is a good thing.... one problem though... this thread has little to do with AVI

Just a note about AVI rendering (even if OT) : there's different configs you can get: go with the *Uncompressed* one... ; )

GregFlowers,
I recorded images onto Digital Master tape. They are beautiful when playing back.

I imported those m2t files from that tape into Vegas.

I did a simple edit, overlapping scenes to make dissolves.

I mastered that back to miniDV tape.

When I compare the two tapes, there is a slight loss of quality with the miniDV master vs the original Digital Master tape. Not much, but some.

I guess what I really want to know is, what is the best way to release HDV edit? On tape or as a computer file playback? And if as a computer file, which one? Windows Media? QuickTime? AVI? And what settings are best for that? Windows Media almost always encodes darker than my original.

I see there is a "Blu Press" output, which I assume is for BluRay DVD. Has anyone been able to release as BluRay yet?

I guess what I really want to know is, what is the best way to release HDV edit? On tape or as a computer file playback? And if as a computer file, which one? Windows Media? QuickTime? AVI? And what settings are best for that? Windows Media almost always encodes darker than my original.

Well that depends on who you want to release it to, how you want to release it to them (TV? computer? net? disc?), how much storage/bandwidth you're willing to use, and whether you need to keep an archive of the original footage.