It's entirely dependent on the player you want to use. We're rendering to the Main Concept MP4 output, now that it's been tweaked to a very nice point.
There isn't a good template, you need to create your own. I've got a template called "HD Delivery" I can email you a screen shot of if you'd like to have it.
It's set to do 24p from 60i, but you can easily modify that.
BEST
2Pass
240,000,000 Kpbs

Spot.....it would be great to post the screen shot if you are comfy. If not...I would love to get a copy too.

Thanks as always.

CC

Spot,

Thanks for the offer. I just sent an email so you'll have my address. In the meantime, I'll create my own template for MC MPEG4 and see what happens.

It will be interesting to see how much computer horsepower is required to play the resulting file.

There's no perfect answer. Some notes:

Preview in player is a good route to go for creating "comps" for computer delivery. You can render a short test section of the timeline and see if the quality, aspect, look ,sound etc is what you want...and you can make tweaks to the render template to dial in the right delivery settings prior to rendering the whole show.

For computer delivery, you need to factor in delivery of progressive (your typical display monitor) and a pixel aspect ratio of 1.0 (many/most computer players are not PAR aware)

Not every format you can render in Vegas will be watchable on every viewer's computer. Window Media is about as common as formats get but with WM9 (which IS good) the viewer might be asked to download the lastest WM codecs prior to playback. MPEG-4 and MPEG-2, watch out- tons of systems won't be able to play that without a hefty codec download (or possibly even a purchase).

Most compliant codec for Windows and Mac: MPEG-1. Works on every remotely modern computer, ships natively with every OS flavor. Negatives: does not stream, looks bad compared to current compression technolgies like WM9 and H.264 / AVC.

If your production is delivered via web, quality vs. user experience is another thing to deal with- higher bitrates = higher quality (most of the time), but higher bitrate ALWAYS means a longer download.

Spot was nice enough to send the template settings, but they are for very low bandwidth delivery. As I stated in my original post, I was looking for solutions for really high quality output. Basically, I want to be able to deliver, with today's DVD technology, a shiny disk that someone can put into their laptop, and with a Firewire, DVI, or other output, connect that laptop to a big screen HD monitor and see a stunning picture the same way I can if I connect my FX1 to an HD set via Firewire.

John,
Apologies, I mistook what you want to do. email me again, I'll send you the correct one.