Recently plunked down the plastic with B&H and got an HV30. Still getting used to it. I took the family out this weekend to a fair and shot some and put together a small video for one of my blogs.
Using Vegas 6, I forced it to output in SD. (I had previously done a greenscreen test with HDV and it worked okay, but the video did not play realtime in the timeline) As per my usual workflow I rendered as a wmv and then uploaded where it was converted to flash. I have to say I'm not really happy with the resulting quality. my thoughts are that it took the biggest hit from the downconvert.

If you take a look any suggestions would be appreciated. I am about to upgrade to Vegas 8 and hoping that will help things out a bit.

Little video I put together after spending much of the day walking the grounds.
County Living Fair video (http://losttownsvideo.billmecca.com/batsto-country-living-fair-2008/)

Hi Bill. Very interesting video. The big losttowns url is a bit distracting though, not sure if you need something so prominent most of the way through the video.

If you want to improve the quality, I suggest for starters you don't do in-camera downconversion. Until you get Vegas 8, you can still edit in HD with Vegas 6 by capturing in HDV and converting to an intermediary high quality codec such as Lagarith. Needs a lot of hard disk space though.

Next, you could try Divx mp4 instead of WMV for your output render. This seems to stand up better when converted to Flash. And try to render to your final desired resolution, rather than go through 2 stages of downconversion. What bitrate is the final flash video? This should be the single major factor that limits the final quality.

You can probably get a tad better quality by rendering as 1440x1080 Lagarith from Vegas, and doing the downconvert in Virtualdub, but it's a bit troublesome to go to these lengths, especially if the Flash bitrate is on the low side.

Best way to experiment with workflow is to choose a short sample clip that will not take long to process, and then play around until you get the results you want. Preferably, the sample clip should be one that shows a lot of degradation with your existing workflow, so you will see the improvements more easily.

Richard