What is the best codec to use for 1080 24p or 30p when rendering out of Vegas and only playing files from a computer? Looking for the highest quality codec. Not looking to save hard drive space, just as high of quality as possible.
Thanks!

Windows Media at a high bitrate can be outstanding. The player is well distributed among PC users, the file size is not so large as to be irritating, the processor load is good for a P4/3GHz or better, etc.

I'd start with the HD template (CBR) and test it against VBR.

The WMV codec performance is outstandingly better than MPEG-2 for a given bitrate - 8Megabit HD WMV looks way better than 8Mb SD MPEG-2 (typical DVD-SD render), in my opinion.

How does m2t compare ? When I record back to the camcorder for viewing on my HDTV, vegas creates a m2t file. Someone told me this is the highest quality render and the closest thing to raw.

m2t consumes a much greater amount of processing power. It is also typically what HDV is recorded in, and I'm assuming that no matter what has a GOP, so using that is probably not going to be viable for us. We'll probably end up just going to avi, as lossless as possible.

If you're going uncompressed it helps to render to the "Sony YUV" which is a UYVY colorpsace. I use 8-bit and it plays 1080/24p okay off my RAID. There is a bug that develops that limits playback to ~19-20fps which can be resolved with one or two reboots.
-RK