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I need some feedback and perhaps a little education about video rendering. I've been editing in Vegas Pro, but I always find that my resulting avi's are enormous. I normally make 3 minute videos, but the file size can sometimes top 2GB. When I try messing around with the settings, I can drop the file size but only at the obvious cost of video quality. This doesn't make sense to me since I have watched hour long videos with better quality than my own for a fraction of the hard drive space.

What can I do to bring my video sizes down to a manageable size without sacrificing so much quality?

Can you save in a different format/codec? Standard Windows AVI is one of the worst for file size to quality ratio.

Does Vegas do Xvid or Theora?

What resolution and framerate are you working with? Any sort of compression? What codec? Also, what is the purpose of the videos? This will help determing what sort of settings you may need to adjust.

The original video is 29.97 fps, 720x480 taken from a miniDV camcorder. The purpose of the video is for viewing on a DVD player/TV

I believe Vegas will do Xvid, but the last time I tried a codec (I believe I tried DivX), the quality was noticeably worse.

ChipT wrote:

I believe Vegas will do Xvid, but the last time I tried a codec (I believe I tried DivX), the quality was noticeably worse.

All videos use codecs of one kind or another. Even AVI uses one. Try XVid or other codec options; that's how other videos achieve such high quality. If DivX didn't work out it would be because the options you used for that were wrong for the media type (quality preset too low or something).