[Jason Young]

Thanks. I am absolutely recording at the highest quality, and the encoded m2ts files all seem to display around 15,000 and some change for the bitrate. It’s odd to me, that Vegas has to re-encode the file when lower-end applications like Corel Video Studio Pro X3 are smart enough to display the segments of the timeline which will not require re-encoding right before the render. To be honest, the output from Corel is remarkably higher quality and to me it looks like I hooked the camera HDMI directly to the TV and played it back that way.

Perhaps I muffed the Vegas params — there certainly are more to fuss with. I will try the suggestions you mention to see if the quality improves.

As an aside, do you know if the Corel app is doing something to deinterlace the source files that I might be omitting in Vegas? I keep reading about the deinterlace process in Vegas but guess I don’t understand how to do it… it’s quite possible I’m looking right at it and don’t know I suppose. I know it made no difference to change from Upper First to Progressive, and I think that might be because the TV handles the deinterlacing automatically on the fly.

Thanks again for the tips! I much prefer the Vegas interface so let’s hope this helps!