I've done some test renders with QuickTime and Windows Media Player codecs and the results are just as bad looking as the images as they're previewed in the timeline.
I also neglected to mention that I have created a similar "movie" from stills with Vegas before, and everything was fine. That's why it's so frustrating. As I mentioned: in After Effects the media (jpegs) look great but they look horrible in Vegas.

Are you doing the pan/crop at track level or event level?
To explain the difference:
If you drop your hi res still on the TL and zoom into using event pan/crop Vegas starts with the HiRes image and maps the appropraite pixels from that into the 320x240 window. This is about as good as it'll get using any tool.
However if you do it at the track level then firstly the HiRes image is interpolated to 320x240 and then that res image is zoomed into. Obviosly a pretty serious quality hit is going to result. At 2x zoom your effective res is 160x120, doing it at the event level then the res is still 320x240.
Apart from render times though there's no reason to downres the original still, I prefer using png than jpg but either work fine in Vegas. Tiff tends to choke Vegas as it doesn't natively decode tiff.
But one thing you need to understand. Dropping your HiRes still into PS or AE and converting to 320x240 is NOT the same as viewing it cropped at 320x240 no matter what you use to do it. In the first instance a very large amount of data can be used for interpolation and the result will look as good as it can at the final res. When you crop the image to the same size there's NO extra pixels and NO interpolation can take place, you'll probably start to see the results of the jpeg compression as well, depending on how the camera or whatever did the compression. To see what I'm talking about, open the still in PS, enlarge it to 100%, select a rectangular marquee 320x240 and copy that area to a new workarea at 320x240. It will not look that good.

Bob.

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the info and sorry I couldn't reply sooner. I had to log off. I certainly understand what you are saying in the last paragraph and have a vague idea about what you're saying in reference to doing the pan/crop at track level or event level. (My newbieness shows, I know :-))

Having said that I have created a New Project and put the same 640x480 JPEGs into the timeline and they look great.

One thing is obvious to me. Although I don't know how, I royally screwed up with the first attempt.

I do have two questions however. Easy one first:

1 - When I click on Event Pan/Crop is there any way I can have the Size (under Properties > Position) to be 320x240 on all of the images I am working with?

At present, when I open the Event Pan/Crop it is sized at 640x480. I need it at 320x240 to allow for panning and zooming. I resized to 320x240, named it in the Preset so I can resize, but obviously, where I'm doing this for each image it doesn't seem like an elegant way to operate. I'm assuming there is a setting I can choose to have all images automatically sized at my chosen value.

2 - How can I take the five audio tracks from my first attempt (with the poor-quality images) into my new project?

I have fussed over the audio tracks and am happy with them and would rather not try to attempt to create from scratch in a new project.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Steve

Regarding the audio in my second question...apologies to all. I did a render in QuickTime format. I unselected the video, rendered and brought it into my new movie. The quality appears okay.

I guess the only question would be... is there better way?

Thanks in advance.

try setting your project settings to 320x240.

I did that when I created the project under Project Properties > Template : Mutimedia Width: 320 Height: 240

It's as if the Event Pan/Crop cropping tool wants to automatically size itself to the image dimensions.

I don't know why you're having problems doing this. I just tried it exactly the way you described with a series of images ranging from 675 x 962 to 1381 x 899 and everything worked as expected.
Some images were long and narrow and some tall and thin but they displayed exactly as they were shot (i.e. - black borders on top/bottom or left/right).
Going into the Pan/Crop window didn't change anything unless I wanted to zoom in or out or selected "Match Output Aspect".

Mike

OK,
taking your issues in turn.
To start a frsh project you could just save the existing one under another name, then delete all the video tracks and set the project video properties to whatever you need.
Alternatively just render out your audio as say 16/48KHz .wav and bring that in as the audio track of a new project.
Pan/Crop at either track or event level isn't something you add, it's always there. The only reason you don't see it is because it always defaults to the same as the project settings.
Previous suggestion should work fine, set project to whatever size your output needs to be, now your event pan/crop matches. In the Event pan/crop you need to disable scaling, in other words you want to preserve the size of the original so that the pan/crop window matches the output and can be moved around the larger source.

Hope this helps.

Bob.