[Silver Stallion DVDs]

Originally Posted by saltman

You should only be using raw DV avi. anything else would be cascade rendering which will introduce artifacts and degrade the quality.

I've dropped mpeg4 clips into Vegas projects that covered spots where no DV avi footage existed and you'd be hardpressed to tell that the footage was sourced from a lossy format. I don't recommend using sources like this if a DV avi source exists, but a lossy source (if it's the only one available) is better than nothing.

Whenever I included this footage, I used a special rendering process. I learned it from watching the Vegas Video series of DVDs made by Edward Spotted Eagle. I can't remember what it's called at the moment, but basically, it goes over the clip several times in the rendering process and the output is much better than what you would get with a standard VBR encoding. I don't have time to dig for the effect to which I'm referring, but I'll look into more later.

Randy