I am a newer-bie than usual.

I have an HV 20 and a firewire connection to a vostro 400 Dell equipped with Vedas Pro.

The camera is also hooked to to an HD television, and I am getting great video from the camera, (at least as good as the television). So I know the camera is putting out something of quality. The problem is that the resulting discs have lost much of their focus and look LowFi and fuzzy.

What I am trying to do is make watercolor instructional videos. The camera is ceiling mounted and does not move. Capture is without tape, just straight into Vegas. My plan is to capture video at the highest possible fidelity from the camera, and than edit it without loosing much fidelity, if any. Then archiving it, I can put it streaming on the Internet, and later sell DVD's or even HDVD's.

What I need from someone is to tell me what settings to use on my camera and on Vegas There aren't too many, but the permutations are huge.

Can you help.

You'll probably do better asking questions in the Vegas and HV20 forums. Firewire to Vegas capture should give you exactly what the camera sees. There are typically few to no issues with this process, unless you are dealing with dropped frames. You'd know about this because Vegas will report it to you.

On the overall workflow, best results come from staying in HDV through the edit.

Then, you'll take a substantial quality hit in rendering for DVD or Internet use.

Minimizing that obligatory hit in quality when you render is where to focus your efforts. Lots of help for that over in the Vegas forum.

Thanks, I will ask my questions there.