I dunno - I've had a lot of great experience with Quicktime - specifically the Animation codec - not Sorensen (which has also worked very well). The Animation Codec is a close to uncompressed as it gets - incredibly clean with good crisp blacks and sharp details. And at standard resolutions (NTSC - noticed you were in Oregon) it doesn't take that long (the second you jump up to 1280x720 or bigger, good luck on the times!).

And no matter how you cut it, both formats I've mentioned above (even both versions of AVI) are higher quality than mpeg2 at its best - and you'll be bringing in the final animation into ANOTHER program anyway to create the DVD, so as long as you start with higher quality video, it'll look great when you're done.

This discussion, however, has NOT covered render settings in Vue - which you shouldn't be skimping on the settings in the first place if you're actually going for quality - I realize you were only asking about resolution size, but tis really needs to be covered as well or no matter WHAT res you  have it'll just look like junk when you're done. I've done a number of exterior moving background renders for video (for outside the windows of car driving scenes), with Vue settings of Superior, rendering in the Quicktime Animation codec, and they have all been fantastic.

Go for Superior - NOT Broadcast quality! I know this is adding to the render times, but it will NOT be blocky muddy shadows, and it will not have the dull highlights. The resolution is actually quite manageable (720x480) and will go faster than you might think. The final video will be much more crsip to bring into After Effects or Premiere or Final Cut Pro for editing and/or color grading, to match/integrate with video footage, etc.

Hope this helps-
-Lew ;-)