It's not meant as biting criticism, I just give an honest opinion. Dude, most of the stuff I've made has gotten harsh criticism- Not that it bothers me, but I figure the people in this community should have thick skin like they tell everyone else to have. Plus, we should be able to speak honestly without being offended- There's a difference between calling someone a clueless retard and saying a movie clip is mundane.
I don't use vegas compression, so I can't speak much about it. I hear about all kinds of issues with complicated vegas settings when it comes to frag movies, like resampling, deinterlacing, etc. I've always been told by other movie makers to render uncompressed in vegas and use virtualdub with whatever codec to compress. x264 is a popular one, although some people can get decent results with xvid. For small clips, the lagarith lossless one is good too.
Links:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html