I had a bit of a play around at a gig last night and captured about 25mins of 720p footage with the ZS3.
I've dumped it into Vegas and done a couple of quick edits but I can't figure out what settings to use when rendering it - I'm completely lost in the number of different formats and options.
The raw file size is about 2.8GB. My Bluray player will play AVCHD files that are burned to a DVD disc - to my simple mind, this means that I should be able to get the footage comfortably onto a DVD in its original quality. But Vegas Pro 9 doesn't seem to give the option of rendering to the .m2ts - the format the raw file is in.
So, my question is: what format should I be rendering to to ensure that the footage is subject to the least processing and compression? The advice given above would suggest ACV but when I select "Sony AVC" in Vegas, none of the options it gives me seem to fit: all the AVCHD and Bluray options are for 1080i. The best fit seems to be the slightly worryingly named "Internet 16:9 HD 30p".
I'm not interested in streaming or uploading this footage so filesize isn't really a concern - I just want to get the edited version into a playable format with as little processing ocurring as possible.
I know these must be very basic questions but after a few hours of trawling the web, I now know far more but understand much less about the different formats available...