First time trying vegas - few simple questions
 

I captured from my XHA1 camera.
Have my movie edited and ready to export out.

I want to send it as high quality as I can on my PC.
I want to view it with my HD TV.
I selected Blueray output?

I also want to be able to put it on a DVD.
So I guess this would no longer be HD?

I also noticed a check box for rendering on networked computers?
What does this do?

Do you have the ability to burn BlueRay? If not then you need to downrez it to MPG to burn a DVD. Dependent on the length of the content your bitrate to properly burn a DVD will vary.
As for network rendering unless you have 2 computer that talk to each other and both are setup to do rendering don't bother, use the primary computer to render the project.

Remember to get BR you need 1) a BR burner, 2) BR discs and 3) that gets done off the Vegas timeline otherwise you need to render to MPG and author and burn in another app like DVDA or the like.

Nice to see more Chicago folks here!

If you don't have a Blu ray and you can watch your footage on a HDTV through a multimedia HD player(like HD WDTV from Western Digital) that i highly recomend you could render to MPG" template HDV 1080-60i, then you copy ypur stuff on an usb device and you can stick it in your media player (WD is highly recomended).
Off topic:
guys u both are from Chicago?Once on my lifetime i wanna go there, it was my dream to see MJ play at the Stadium and the United Center. Have u ever met him?Sorry 4 da question but for us who live so far from you is very strange to talk about such a legend

Hasta luego

never met him but did see him play at the United Center a few times. Hey remember basketball season in Chicago is COLD! ;-)

Isn't mpg going to compress and loose quality.

I want to play high quality on my PC or streamed to my PS3.

Greg:

The highest quality format on your PC is uncompressed format. This can take up to a TB of information - sometimes more - for a movie's length.

The question is - what is "acceptable" quality?

For me, I find acceptable quality using AVC compression (from Main Concept) and 25mbps - that's 25 mega bits (of information) per second.

The more information you have in your file, the closer the video is to the actual reality recorded by the sensor. Chances are, if you've recorded to HDV tape, you're already using HDV compression at 25mbps.

For playback, I usually find that 8MBPS is acceptable for 1080p material, and this should make your movie fit - as a data file - onto a DVD. That doesn't mean that the movie will play in a DVD player however - it's just a data file.

Greg, unless the project is 3 hours long it really won't take a big hit quality wise IF it's rendered to MPG/AC3 at the proper bitrate. At least not enough to be objectionable. Of course, again, a 3 hour project won't be a high a bitrqte as a 30 minute project.

If you want the highest quality then you need to play it straight out of the camera to your TV.

So if I have a 5min clip I can't get the same quality as my camera?

what you get from the camera is video in it's purest sense, untouched by human hands. Having said that a 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 minute piece if captured, rendered and burned properly, meaning you didn't change the bitrate to something it should be at or doing some other something that would destroy the quality of the footage the quality would not be harmed.
Please keep in mind that you are looking for an absolute and quality is in the eye and mind of the beholder, there is no such thing as absolute.
What you considered to be bad quality someone else might not see it that way.

It is going to compress, yes. And the compression is lossy, meaning it throws some of the data out. That means that after decompression you will not have the exact same pixel data as you had before the compression.

Now, whether you lose quality is an entirely different question. The MPEG compression is designed on the psycho-visual model, which takes advantage of the fact that when processing visual input we do not view individual tiny little specs of light but the image as a whole. The MPEG compression throws out those parts of the image that we do not notice, so even if the data is not the same, we still perceive the same image.

It also allows for different bit rates. The higher the bit rate, the less data is thrown out. Below a certain threshold, which may not be the same for everyone, we start noticing the difference. But above that threshold we do not. And because of that, losing some of the visual detail does not equate to losing quality.