[Aivis Zons]

Judging by your current render times you should see a drastic improvement in performance.

With 4K definitely look into using Proxies if you’re not doing it already.

“Intel has better performance overall” – not sure about this one, but you shouldn’t look at “overall” as you have a pretty specific use case. There must be some benchmarks out there that roughly match your projects. In the more recent years AMD has simply had the better price for performance in my region +more cores.

32GB vs 64GB – I personally stopped at 32GB and haven’t run into any bottlenecks so far. I’d say go for 32 and upgrade in the future if necessary as you can just add more sticks.

[Aivis Zons]

I’d recommend going for something like a Ryzen 7 5800X and an RTX 3060 TI, that should be fairly balanced. That’s not the very latest gen, but good luck finding that at reasonable prices. From personal experience a better CPU has actually given me more performance as not everything’s GPU accelerated. So perhaps see if you can upgrade that within your budget. Don’t hesitate to check the 2nd hand market. I also don’t recommend you go for an AMD card yet, because while AV1 encoding is improving, it’s not the standard quite yet.

Go for 32GB of RAM at 3200MHz or higher.

Motherboard – maybe some B550 model.

Don’t save on storage. Get a good ssd for your projects and assets, and maybe a hard drive for archival purposes. Fills up faster than you think.

To find the most “optimal” setup that’s also compatible I always use pcpartpicker and I suggest you do the same, might even find a build that someone else has already made with similar components and copy that. Just don’t skimp out on RAM & storage, that’s very important for video editing.

[Aivis Zons]

Hey, your system specs do look fairly outdated, and I’m actually somewhat doubtful if they’ll be supported by the current version of Vegas Pro. You can look at the system requirements here.

As for whether VP19 will work with all of the VP11 developed videos – I’d like to say that yes, they should. You can actually test this before buying the upgrade by downloading the free trial (there’s a link at the bottom of the requirements page with a label “Free trial”). In addition you can keep both versions of Vegas Pro installed at the same time. If something doesn’t work in VP19, just do it in VP11. The trial might be VP20, but that shouldn’t matter in your case.

The new version does have a lot of improvements, but if you should actually upgrade is up to you. Will there be a measurable benefit from the upgrade or will it just be a new interface? Will you use any of the new features? Are there any bugs that annoy you in VP11? etc. etc.

[Aivis Zons]

I would say that if possible importing as 48khz is preferable as then you preserve the original quality of the audio file, but realistically if you do an uncompressed render to 48khz in vegas there shouldn’t be a noticeable difference anyway.

Personally I haven’t really ran into any problems with mismatching samples rates in the past by just making sure that everything matches – source, project, render.

[Aivis Zons]

Unfortunately I don’t think there is a way to render ProRes with 5.1 surround in Vegas Pro, at least not natively as I couldn’t find such options either.

What you could do instead is render your project in ProRes stereo, separately render your audio in 5.1 and then combine the two in some other software that would support it. If your project is simple enough, you could try using one of the File -> Export options and skip the extra renders.

Otherwise I’d look into whether it absolutely must be delivered in Apple ProRes as other formats do support 5.1 renders.

[Aivis Zons]

If the source footage is purely digital – you don’t have access to the original, this is all you have – then I’d say that the only thing you can really do in vegas pro is applying a Denoiser effect and if necessary Flicker Control.
Won’t get rid of the lines, but might clear everything up quite a bit.
You could try to duplicate the video track, offset it horizontally a bit and maybe with the right effects and compositing modes you can “improve” the look, but I’m fairly skeptical. That would more likely be a “different” look rather than a “better” one.

If you do have the physical source recording, then a lot of it is down to the hardware used to digitize this. Better hardware – better results, noticeable difference.

Alternatively you could try using some AI tools, such as Topaz. There should be a free trial available to test it out, but if you have any questions, don’t hesitate and head over to the AI forum

[Aivis Zons]

Hey, there’s actually a jobs section here at Creative COW – https://jobs.creativecow.net/
You can either post your listing there or look through the posted resumes.

Beyond that I’d personally suggest upwork or fiverr when looking for freelancers.

As far as costs go – it all varies from person to person. So be as specific as possible and ask for their pricing directly and what’s possible, what’s not editing-wise. Prepare multiple examples of what you’re going for, but also point out what you wouldn’t want to see. If you have a fixed budget – mention it in the listing.

Basically, the more specific and thorough you are, the less time you’ll spend on sifting through applicants and potential revisions.

[Aivis Zons]

Open Vegas Pro, go to Options -> Preferences -> Deprecated Features and tick “Enable the QuickTime plugin”.

If you don’t see such an option or it doesn’t work, you might have to download/reinstall QuickTime.

[Aivis Zons]

To achieve basic stabilization you need to add the “Video Stabilization” effect. Note that there’s also a “Stabilization” effect, which is an older version that also works okay but isn’t as beginner friendly I’d say.
Add your clip to the timeline, go to the Video FX tab, look for the effect, drag and drop it onto your clip and click “Stabilize”. It will then analyze your footage and once it’s done you’ll be able to adjust the smoothness to your liking. That would be the very basics of it. You can change the user view from basic to professional or expert if you’re looking for more control.

Note that if you make any cuts or trim the clip after you’ve added stabilization and analyzed the clip – it will remove all stabilization and you will have to click “Stabilize” again. So either make your edits beforehand or render the whole stabilized clip and use that. From my experience it’s just cuts and trimming that forces you to redo stabilization – adding extra effects has been fine.

[Aivis Zons]

I setup voice.ai, tried recording a sound byte in Vegas Pro and it just worked without any extra steps whatsoever. The only thing I did was open Vegas Pro after I’ve opened voice.ai and set everything up. My settings were the same as in your video – Live Mode [on], Voice Changer [on], Hear Yourself [off].

Then I selected an Audio Track and started recording: Ctrl + R or click the red circle at the bottom left of the timeline (also found under the video preview, but there it might be hidden by default).

I could also toggle the voice changer and it would toggle in the recording as well.

The only potential problem I noticed was that comparing my base microphone recording volume to the voice.ai live – the voice changer is significantly more quiet. Though that’s likely down to some settings as I just left everything default + you can normalize the audio if you wanted to.

So it should just work as long as you could just record your default mic in Vegas Pro beforehand.