AVCDH to Mpeg2 (DVD) output too soft

Are you having problemsrendering with pristine AVCHD source material (1920×1080 50i PAL) looks softer than good quality source SD material (720×576 50i PAL) – when rendered out to DV (720×576 50i PAL) in Vegas 9.0c

if so try this tip from johnmeyer on the Sony Vegas Forums.

Put the Sony Sharpen fX onto every AVCHD event, and set it to ZERO. Even when set to zero,
it still provides a touch of sharpening (at least this was true in 7.0d and 8.0c — I don’t use 9.x).

You can also assign this fX to the media in the media pool (which may be faster than
assigning it to dozens of events). Or, you can assign it to the track or to the output bus
(see the fX button on the Preview window), but only if you don’t have any other media
(photos, SD footage, generated media, etc.). You really only want to sharpen the AVCHD,
and nothing else.

I have found that this completely solves the “soft” problem. Make sure to render using Best when doing this. The only downside is that the Sharpen fX is slow, so it does add quite a bit of time to the render.