I have a lovely 1 hour piano recital That I recorded with my Sony HVR-V1U.
Looks great, especially when I render it out with the 1080i 60 template from Vegas...but of course it makes a 13 GB file.

What is the best way to render/compress this file in order to fit and play nicely on a standard DVD-R

I have access to Final Cut Studio and Toast if I need to use those to compress it better.

Ode to have a Blu-Ray Burner...and all the parents have a Blu-Ray Player!

You need to render it out to a standard definition template or create your own. You can do this by selecting the template once you go to Render. Since this is a Vegas forum and we only use vegas, I'm really not sure how you would do that in FCP.

Options:
render to a SD Mpeg2 template

render to SD avi and transcode in your DVD authoring program

That's what I was thinking...render out to mpeg-2
I just pushed the button so I'll let you know in an hour what the file size is like!
Jason

Well, keep in mind, Jason, that the file size will depend on the bitrate you have selected. We have found that transcoding to avi and then using an authoring program will maximize the quality of your video on the disc. We use Adobe Encore for our DVD creation and it auto selects the highest bitrate that it can wihile ensuring it fits on to the disc. The auto bitrate depends on how long the video is. Just think, if you encode to Mpeg2 and it is only 2 GB, then you have wasted space on the disc and the quality of your video may not look that great (again, depending on length of video). On the other hand, if you render and the file is too large for the disc, you have to go back and re-encode it or transcode anyways. Transcoding a rendered mpeg file, you may start to see some noticeable degragation due to generation loss.

I used a bit rate calculator
Raised it to 8mbps rendered it to mpeg2 (made the almost 2gb file up to almost 4 GB)
restarted the computer on the Mac side...threw it into Toast and out popped a great DVD (for some reason me and DVD architect do not get along very well, I'm sure it's user error)
Video looks great, audio is good, DVD plays with no skips...off to someone else to proofread all the names!

Thanks for the help and advice

Glad to see it worked out.

Here's another question for you
I rendered it using the 8-bit...how much of a difference would it be if I rendered it out at 32-bit.
Just thought I would ask before I made my computer do all that hard work!

Honestly, I have never tried, but you may get some extra people looking if you post it as a seperate thread or do a search. Something like "8 bit vs. 32 bit renedering", but be specific on what you would like to know.