The only way I know of to save the lower part of the Project Settings, is to start a new project, set the project settings you want as default, then save that as something like ‘Default Project’ to your desktop. Then whenever you start a new project load Vegas by clicking on the ‘Default Project.veg’ desktop icon, or after loading Vegas, open the ‘Default Project.veg’, then immediately save this project with an appropriate name of your project in the your projects folder, so you do not inadvertently save over the ‘Default Project’.
Maybe someone else knows a trick I don’t. If so I would also like to know.
Best Regards…..George