Just thought I should report my findings re DVD quality problems. I've done lots of tests on the clips that are causing the biggest problems. The common thread with the problems is sharply defined vertical or horizontal lines where there is movement in the frame. For instance a shot looking down at my legs descending some steps caused a lot of jaggies because coincidentally the steps were made up of small tiles with well defined lines. The jaggies were occurring at the boundary of my trousers and the tiles.

I finally concluded that the problem was not in the mpg file produced by Vegas or burned to the disc by Architect. But rather to do with the way the DVD player interpreted the file and possibly even related to the brand of the disc I burned to. I got the same result of jaggies whether the disc was played in the PC or my TV player. I did manage to effect some improvement by lowering the bit rate in the "Render As" in Vegas. It would appear that higher bit rates (above 6mps) made the problem worse. In fact I found fixed bitrates worked slightly better. To put it into context the rate of movement within the frame is not really that high compared with say filming a moving car. So it has something to do with how the decompression process deals with sharply defined moving horizontal or vertical lines/edges.

In the end I got over the problem by slowing down the rate of movement in Vegas using the Velocity Envelope feature. In fact I was able to slow the film down by 50% without any evident jerkiness. I thought this quite impressive. Across the range of problems I had, I found slowing the film down to between 75% and 50% of the original speed did the trick.

The following is a summary list of examples where the problem of jaggies occurred:
1. Shot looking down on my legs descending some steps that happened to be tiled with sharply defined horizontals and verticals.
2. Pan across a building where the jaggies showed up on the verticals of the window frames. The pan was not fast, and the jaggies were almost wavy.
3. Zoom out from a graphic frame where the jaggies showed up on the verticals. In fact the problem was not in evidence if the zoom was fast or slow, but only at an intermediate speed.
4. In a barn doors type scene transition where the verticals of the two doors created a wavy line effect which could easily be interpreted as intentional. In fact I left it as it was. This problem could possibly be overcome by changing the speed of the transition. Fortunately I don't often use this type of transition.

I see a lot of repeat posts for similar issues on this forum, and I get the feeling of reinventing the wheel on a regular basis. Perhaps some effort could be applied by Sony to create FAQ's out of any useful posts. Save a lot of time all round. I realise it is possible to do a search, but this often doesn't produce useful results.

Thanks to all for help with identifying possible solutions.

Maurice