How can one go higher or is that not possible and what is the overall effect on image quality? I'm referring to when rendering in HD.

The highest what?

Erm..Bitrate.

bitrate for what? dvd, mp4, mpg, whatever?

What does bit rate have to do with editing?

Vegas edits uncompressed bitmaps/video frames. They have no bit rate while in Vegas. Bit rate is only meaningful with certain (not all) file compression codecs. And Vegas can both read and write various file formats. It also supports third party codecs. So there is no "highest" bit rate in Vegas.

i think the op might be after rendering bit rates?

Maybe he's talking about color depth? 8bit/10bit/32bit etc?

maybe he's after a 2 bit rate?

Lee, there may be a bit of confusion over mbps and Mbps. They are the same in this context, just don't confuse them with MBps. 8Mbps is the default for Sony's AVC at HDV resolution. For compressed HD, choose your codec, AVC or MainConcept and click on the "custom" button. The max for AVCHD is 16mbps which is fine for quality. The default for Mainconcept is 25mbps, which already is more than an AVCHD camera bitrate, but you can go as high as 80mbps.

WMV format. I want the best image quality thats all.I'm still a novice in Vegas and want to render the best video for Vimeo and DVD.

With respect, "best" is a difficult concept to deal with in rendering video quality. If 8 is good, wouldn't 16 be better? Why not 32Mbps - that should be 4x better right? Why stop there, when 100Mbps allows so much more?

The concept we have to deal with, IMHO, is "good enough". Is my render good enough for Vimeo? Are you seeing things you don't want at 8Mbps WMV when Vimeo spits it back?

Once you select "custom" on the render dialog, you'll see all the choices. 8Mbps is just a template, though it should be plenty for HD WMV distribution.

You may get slightly better picture-quality-for-a-given-bitrate with AVC/MP4 codecs. However, at high bitrates that difference is so very slight, and WMV is very, very good indeed, and a solid encoder.

DVD is different - if you're working with DVD Architect, best results come from rendering a standards-compliant MPEG2 video and AC3 audio files in Vegas. There's a bit to learn about that export process, but, if your video is less than an hour, select one of the "NTSC DVD for DVD Architect" MPEG2 templates and go into the custom dialog and make sure the bitrate doesn't exceed 8Mbps. Then, render your audio to AC 3 separately. These two files should be picked up by DVDA without re-rendering if you've done them correctly.

That's just an outline of the DVD process. There a plenty of posts and a few helper scripts for DVD output. Edward Troxel has written great beginner guides in his excellent newsletters (http://jetdv.com), and they are a very worthwhile read.

The presets in vegas for WMV are low bitrates, why is this??