How come when I burn a DVD with Sony Vegas Studio 8 , or any program, it never looks as good as a store bought DVD? I am shooting with Canon HV30 and burning project at high settings. I have a 1080p television
and Panasonic BD50 Blu-ray/DVD player. The footage looks great when shown straight from video camera with HDMI hook up and looks good on computer but not on TV after burning to DVD. Any suggestions or info?
Thanks

are you burning a NTSC DVD
or
a 1440x1080 HD DVD for use on a PS3 or similar?
When you watch from the cam via HDMI it is a HD picture 4 times the size of a standard DVD.
Render out of Vegas to Bluray in the Sony AVC format. This should put you in the right direction to achieving the quality you're after.

I'm guessing it's all related to settings. I know the "Movie Studio" version doesn't let you get to the Custom settings so you're using whatever defaults Sony has provided. Then if you're resizing HD to SD, you need to make sure that you render in "Best".

There is a long thread that discusses this in considerable detail. http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-happens-vegas/271329-maximizing-hd-sd-quality.html

By my own tests, I have found that I get better results by resizing and encoding to MPEG-2 for DVD in TMPGEnc. It uses the Lanczos-3 resizing algorithm which yields sharper results, A friend has observed the same with Premiere Pro. This isn't surprising since Vegas and Premiere Pro use the Main Concepts MPEG encoder.