8Mbps wmv better than 8Mbps Blu-ray
 

I rendered a hdv clip into both 8Mbps wmv and Blu-ray and the wmv has much less artifacting and overall looks much better when viewed on Windows Media Player. I will rerun with 25Mbps wmv to see how it does. I'm using Main-Concept MPEG-2 (.m2v).

What Blu-ray set-up are you guys finding to be the best?

40 Mbps mp4/wmv.

WMV and h.264 will look better a low bitrates than MPEG2. Commercial Blu-ray discs can use one of three different codecs, MPEG2, h.264 and VC-1. VC-1 is the official SMPTE name for WMV and is used on quite a few spectacular looking Blu-ray releases. You can use up to 40 Mbps on a Blu-ray disc.

Thanks John and Perrone. Another quick ask. I'm finding that when I render a .m2t hdv files and insert them back into a Vegas 8 project as an .avi, it looks horrible; lots of speckled lines and such. I was trying to avoid rendering back into .m2t thinking that would compress the files a 2nd time (and then a 3rd when I render for a disc...).

What's the best (least loss) way to render .m2t files so they can be reinserted into other projects. I'm wanting to combine several smaller hdv projects into a master project without the heft of all the source files contained in each sub-project. I'm using an XH-A1 and an HDR-HC3.

Render it to any lossless format. I typically use Cineform .avi, huffyuv .avi, or PNG (best) .mov files.

3 magic letters: VBR.

But mostly you need at least 15+Mbps for 1080p or 720p60.