You are rendering to uncompressed.
You should be rendering to DVD compliant MPEG-2.

Hmmm....I think you may have cleared something up for me.

Would .avi be considered a render that reflects original project size and all other 'render' choices are merely forms of 'compression' to accommodate the programs we use to make the DVD.

Jeez....I hope that makes a modicum of sense?

Thanks musicvid....

Unintuitively, the number and size of the pictures makes no difference at all for the output size of the project. The size is determined by two things, and two things only: duration of the hole project, and the bitrate used when rendering. It doesn't matter if you have one thumbnail size picture on the timeline or 25GB of HD action footage. That idea takes some getting used to, but it's very important to grasp it.

DVDs must be MPEG2; there's no other acceptable choice. So the best option is to render to MPEG2 to begin with. To pick the appropriate bitrate a very simple calculation is to divide the length in minutes into 600 to get the mbps rate. If your video is 80 minutes long then 600 / 80 = 7.5mbps. Subtract about 0.2 to leave room for the audio, so the video bitrate would be about 7.3mbps. In any case you shouldn't go above about 9mbps or some DVD players will have trouble keeping up. Going much below 4.5 (depending on the material) can lead to a lot of artifacts especially in fast motion scenes.

AVI is not necessarily uncompressed. AVI is just a way of organizing the audio & video data, while each stream can have any of a variety of compression codecs, or none. There's also no reason that the render has to match the source at all. Certainly Vegas doesn't default an AVI render to match the source. It can indicate which templates are a close match, but it's up to you to choose the one you want.