Best settings for an HD live concert
 

I apologize if I sound to you as unexperienced and dumb as I sound to myself, but I shot a live concert this wednesday with an HV30, and an A1, and the audio, it's gonna be great. I'm almost done with the 1hr. and 45 min project. What I would like to know, is coming from others' past experiences, what would be the best rendering settings, and under what file type.

Now, the main center of my guessing is the file type. I'm on a PC so a mov wouldnt be wise. avi is unsupported, and huge, etc. plus will using a variable or constant bit rate be better, and uner what parameters? I'm using Vegas 6 (upgrades are expensive, I know)

What I need is as small a file as possible, without losing my pretty pixels :D

Thank You!

There is no "best" setting because of the number of variables involved. What maximum file size will work, what picture quality can you live with (you will lose some of your pretty pixels), what bit rate is acceptable, what is your delivery format and who is your end user? The answer is test, test, test. Make a short clip and work the variables until you find an acceptable end product then apply those settings to your final project. Last I checked QuickTime works in windows too.

Thank you for your time and response, I also apologize again for sounding more inexperienced than I am. As I stated, this is my first HD project of this magnitude. Heck, the biggest project I've done was a 1 hour play in SD. This is an hour and a half HD project (like I said), so my inexperience with a project of this caliber prevents me from even guessing how big that file would be. I would think around 20gigs. And, obviously I will lose pixels, I just need settings that constrain that loss the most. and i was hoping someone would tell me what bit rate would be better for this. And I know quicktime works with windows, it's not as efficient as nero or WMP for that matter, at least on my comp, and I've got two dual cores. My problem is that I don't have enough time to test, test, and test, like I did back when I worked with all SD, I was hoping someone would share they're experience with a project simlar to this.

This will end up being a pretty serious DVD for the band. Thank you, any more help would be appreciated.

I don't understand why "avi is unsupported"

When the final result was an SD DVD, I just rendered the whole project out to an AVI and used that to author the DVD.

Some authoring programs (such as TMPG DVD Author 3.0) allow you to actually drag the M2T files into the timeline, so you could render out in HDV M2t if you trust your DVD transcoder.

It all depends on what Software you're using.

DVDs are 480i, so you're already doing to be cutting your pixels in half. A single Layer DVD will hold 1:45 at a good bitrate. If you're burning dual-layer you could probably go max bitrate.

Your post is kinda vague though. Last concert I shot in HD, I edited it in HDV, and like I said, just rendered the whole thing out to DV AVI. It's still going to end around 4.5 gigs or so because it has to fit on a DVD.