As a complete novice to Vegas what little knowledge I have gained has been by much trial and error in addition to the knowledge that I have gained from the forum.

From the beginning it has been drummed into me to set the Project Properties from the outset. However, I have learnt myself that whilst this advice is generally good one should also consider the weakest link in the chain. So, if for example, your final output is to be a DVD then the resolution of this media needs to be taken into account and this can vary depending on your location i.e. a PAL or an NTSC region. Another factor is whether or not your project contains a mixture of still images in addition to movie clips in which case a compromise has to be found.

What I do is to set the Project Properties to PAL DV (720 x 576, 25fps) and ensure that I have 'safe areas' shown in the Preview screen. Using Pan/Crop I now (holding the Alt key) drag one corner of the still images so that they fit within the safe areas. With the HD videos I drag the top down (or bottom up) so that once again they fit within the safe areas. However, because of the resolution of these videos they will extend width wise outside of the safe area so this needs to be taken into account when recording the videos in the first place so that the main subject remains central in your recording.

I then click on the 'Make DVD' menu which takes it into DVD Architect and burn the DVD and overall have been very satisfied with the results.

Sizing your material to fit within the safe areas is not an optimal solution. That lowers the resolution and will leave black borders around the edge of the frame. On some displays the borders can be rather large and the image rather small.

Ideally the pictures and video should be shot with safe areas in mind, making sure that the important parts of the subject fall within the safe areas while still filling the entire frame.

I hear what you say Chienworks but in my case this certainly hasn't been the case at least on my HDTV which has a black screen from the word go obviously. In fact all the still images that I placed in a recent project first had the canvas area increased in Photoshop giving a white frame and then a bit of drop shadow to make the images pop out from the white frame. After burning the project to DVD and then playing it back on the HDTV I noticed that with one image I hadn't fully pushed the bottom into the safe area with the result that the white border (frame) was slightly smaller than the other three sides. Had it not been for the adding of a white border to all the images I'd probably have ended up cutting either the head or feet of some of them LOL. Personally I'd settle for loosing a bit on the resolution knowing that I'm displaying the full image.

Try keeping your photos the same size but converting them to .PNG for use in Vegas.
You can batch convert photos in Irfanview.

With the advantage being.....?

PNG places less demands on Vegas resources and is generally acknowledged to work better and faster than jpeg with high resolution photos on the timeline. As search of the Pro forums will lead you to literally hundreds of posts on the subject.

Ah, ok - many thanks. Next project png then. :-)

Thanks so much for all of your helpful advise.

@ musicvid. I wonder if you could be so kind as to point me the way to a few of these discussions over on the Pro site as I myself am having difficulty locating anything of relevance.

Whilst I don't for one moment doubt what you say it seems odd that a jpg image of 664kb that I just opened in Photoshop and then re-saved in the PNG format consequently producing a file size of 13MB (interlaced), 14MB (when not interlaced) could speed things up on the timeline.

Well, there's a couple issues here that actually point both ways.

In order for Vegas to make use of the image data it has to uncompress it to full resolution 24 bit color. It doesn't matter if you start with a .6MB .jpg or 14MB .png, it's still going to be a full uncompressed image buffer when Vegas uses it. From that standpoint it doesn't matter.

On the other hand, presumably Vegas has to do more work to pull the image data out of the more compressed .jpg file than out of the slightly compressed .png file.

There has been a lot of discussion about .png being "Vegas' native image format." I can't find a single authoritative cite for this and i don't believe it. There were some issues early on with large .jpg files hitting up against a Vegas bug and causing memory crashes. The bug is gone, but the one-time solution of converting to .png has entered the realm of apocrypha. So, while it's true that there may be less CPU usage for decoding a .png file, i don't see a lot of hard evidence for one format being more troublesome than the other. Using smaller image dimensions is going to help way more than transcoding formats.

I think it's a lot more likely that those having trouble with .jpg files may have installed some obscure software that has tinkered with the .jpg libraries on their system and replaced the decoder with something less stable. I often do projects with thousands of multi-megapixel .jpg files and have no trouble whatsoever.

Thanks for that very detailed reply Chienworks. Having time on my hands I'm going to have a play with this if for no other reason than interests sake. I'll keep the task manager open and monitor CPU usage for both jpg and png files.

Just one final question - when saving to png from within Photoshop there is an option to save as interlaced or non. Of the two, what would be the best option? Thanks.