[Bernie Lademann]

Vegas 13 did not fully utilise multiple CPUs nor did it do GPU rendering. If you have a modern CPU/GPU you should definitely see a significant improvement on render speed. I am still using Vegas 16 and noticed landmark improvements to all previous versions with regard to render speed on current technology PC hardware.

[Bernie Lademann]

There is no right answer to your question. There is always going to be trade-off between quality and filesize, no matter what you do. It is all a function of the data rate. This was even the case with DVD production, however, unlike DVD production where the data rate had a top limit and the video size also had a top limit, current distribution formats for video have much higher limits in both video image sizes and the data rate.

In the end, you will always have to make a compromise based on your customer perception and also based on the equipment that your customers are likely to play the videos on.

Vegas allows you to set the data rate for most of the video formats and this is the figure that ultimately set the filesize and the perceived video quality.

Try some experiments with the following settings:

Container: mp4
Video format: AVC
High definition (1920×1080)

Profile: High
Entropy coding: CABAC
Bit rate: 4,000,000

I have found that is setting is the most compact and acceptable on most slow moving subject matter.

Review the video and if it is not acceptable, start incrementing the bit rate. (I typically upload video to YouTube or Vimeo with the bitrate set to 16,0000,000 as you want to start off high, as these streaming services then downsample as required.

Don’t be afraid to spend a couple of days, rendering at various data rates and reviewing it on different playback equipment. That’s what I did when I first changed to HD.

[Bernie Lademann]

Hi Luigi,

DVD footage does not have square pixels. To get the aspect ratio correct, you have set up a few things correctly.

1. Set your project settings up to match your target video aspect, pixel size and frame rate.

2. When you import media select the cropping icon on the timeline and look at the positioning of the footage within the frame. By right clicking you get a menu which lets you match either source aspect or output aspect.

3. When you render you again have the choice to change the aspect ratio and pixel size, so check it there as well.

Cheers,

Bernie

[Bernie Lademann]

Hi Andy,

Time and time again, people have questions regarding mp4 conversion and fail to give any details of the CODEC contained within the mp4 container. Unfortunately, the container has very little bearing on what to do to fix your problem. It could just has easily have been an m4v, mkv, mov, avi container and the answer would be the same.

Firstly I would suggest you install a program such as MediaInfo or similar to have a look at the CODEC contained within your mp4 file. It will give you details on what FreeMake did when it encoded the video for you.

Once you have this, you can make an informed decision on what settings to choose for any re-encoding.

My advice is if you want to preserve the original quality of the encoded video, don’t use Vegas at all.

There is another high popular tool called FFMPEG which is actually used behind the scenes in nearly every piece of commercial software which will allow you to make modifications to both the CODEC and the container and if you are trying to preserve the quality of the content, it can also do frame-for-frame conversions which can actually repackage the video without touching the source.

As Red-Rob correctly suggested, once you know what your source material is encoded as, you then understand what benefits, or detriment, that re-encoding will do.

For example changing a lower bitrate to the higher one, has no benefit other than taking up more space.

Changing a CODEC from mpeg2 to h264 will essentially allow you encode and take up less space. Etc.

So while Vegas can do what you want to and do it well, you need to understand what your custom settings need to be within the render settings for Vegas, to get the best result without wasting disk space or further degrading the video quality.

Cheers,

Bernie.

[Bernie Lademann]

They should both give you the same finished product. The MainConcept one is “older” as it was the one shipped with Sony Vegas many years ago, but as far as I am aware, no development is being done on this renderer by Magix. The Magix one is the one to use if you want to be sure that you get the best rendering performance with current hardware.

[Bernie Lademann]

Hi Alex,

There is no right answer to your question. “Mobile” has changed so much over the years in both the ability for people to download at high speed and the also the screen resolution and computing power of mobile devices.

I originally, encoded videos with a specification that would make them play well even with very low powered smart phones. “Back in the day”, I picked 512×288 pixel, h264, 25fps in an mp4 container. Surprisingly this still stands the test of time in that the video files are very compact, file sizes are very small, allowing my clients to have hour long videos on their phones.

Today, the processors in mobile devices are very powerful, internal memory is enormous and the screen resolution is exceptional. In effect, most mobile devices can play HD or 4K video better than their desktop counterparts.

So technically, you have to know your lowest common denominator, in your target audience (clients). And ask the following questions:

1. Is the video going to be streamed in real-time to their device?

2. What is the maximum bitrate that will play back smoothly on the processors in the mobile devices for your content?

3. What file size do you consider acceptable for your video, if you want your clients to store the movies on their device?

4. How much movement is in the video content. Fast action movies require higher bitrates for smooth stutter-free video.

Once you have these parameters figured out, you can set a pixel size, bitrate, fps combination that meets your criteria.

I am currently delivering mobile content in HD, 25fps (Australia), 5Mbps and have very happy clients.

Incidentally, there are many online calculators that will give the relationship between the parameters I have described. You don’t even have to know any maths!

Cheers,

Bernie.

[Bernie Lademann]

The most common misunderstanding that people have is that MP4 is a container format and it can contain video and audio with different codecs. There are two reasons why your settings above are unlikely to work for many people.

Vegas offers you h264 = AVC, or h265 = HEVC codecs. The later is very new and not supported on many devices yet. So I suggest for compatibility to use the AVC/AAC presets.

Secondly, the bitrate is a critical setting when it comes to playability on various devices. The option you have set on the screenshot above will work on most newer computers, however, it will struggle with older ones. Since your source material is from DVD, it is not of much value encoding with very high bitrates as you will not notice the difference. For maximum compatibility with all types of older computer hardware, I would recommend CBR of 6 Mbps.

Remember that this recommendation is based on your requirements. The default settings provided by Vegas is usually just fine on most computers with the latest generation of CPUs/graphics cards.

The symptoms you describe are what you would expect if the client computer is unable to keep up with the bitrate of the video file. You usually get an error message if the client is unable to decode using the codec you have specified, however, as I said h265 is relatively new and it may be that the video decoding is pushed into an underpowered CPU and results in long pauses or stuttering.

Ultimately, the quality of encoding can only be judged by yourself, since you know what the original material looks like. I would suggest starting off with the suggested settings above and even consider lowering the bitrate if you cannot see a difference, since it will result in a smaller video file which is even easier to play on older hardware.

[Bernie Lademann]

I use iZotope RX too. It has saved my bacon on so many occasions when field recording in hostile (noisy) environments. It’s worth every cent. Also, I never use the noise gate for any projects. Having audio which just disappears completely sounds almost as terrible as the noise itself!

[Bernie Lademann]

Firstly, I don’t work for Magix, nor am I running VP18, so take my advice with a grain of salt. I have, however, been using Vegas Pro commercially for a very long time and thought I would share some tips which should help you to decide on what is going on here.

Vegas uses the GPU/s in one of four ways.

1. Dynamic RAM preview
2. Rendering to the preview window
3. Accelerated processing in most of the plugins
4. Final rendering.

From what I can tell, they are supposed to be independent, however my experience has been that there is clashes, so to get a stable system, I have had to decide on what has priority ie. maximum speed gain by turning off all but one of the GPU options above. In my system I have had to

– turn off 1. (by setting the value to 0)
– set one of my non-default GPUs up the processor for the render preview window or when I only had one GPU, set it to NONE.
– turned ON GPU rendering in all of my plugins.
– Used only the CPU for rendering in the final renders. (when I only had one GPU) but have recently used the nVidia accelerated options as it uses a default GPU.

Vegas originally performed best on AMD cards but this is no longer the case, based on the performance figures that others have published.

I notice that you have a relatively old AMD graphics card and this could well be an issue with later versions of Vegas. I suspect that this is what Magix tech support will suggest as a first step to fix this problem. Investing in a newer GPU is not wasted money as most modern applications will benefit from the extra computing power.

There is some useful user information in this post:

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-graphics-cards-gpu-acceleration-for-vegas-pro–104614/

Hope this helps you to get back up to speed.

[Bernie Lademann]

Hi Jono,

While I cannot tell you which way to go with your particular hardware, I can tell you what I have found with choosing the what to use. I have a machine which has Intel i9-9920X and 3 x Nvidia Quadro P4000 CPUs. I chose this hardware configuration because I use both Vegas Pro (for video) and Redshift (for 3D animation) in my daily work. I have found that there is very little difference in using the CPU and the GPU for render in Vegas on my machine, despite the fact that it has 3 GPUs!

My suggestion is try a render test of a much shorter area in your project (10 seconds of video, for example) with the following (assuming you want to create MP4 files with h264 or h265 compression):

Sony AVC

Magix AVC – CPU

Magix AVC – NVIDIA NVEC

Then pick the fastest one. The quality of the CPU renderer was once very poor with lots of artefacts, however, I cannot fault it in current versions of Vegas, so you can trust that the output will be good with either CPU or GPU.

IMPORTANT: You must set the “Dynamic RAM Preview” to 0, in your settings. I guarantee that you will have a messed up output if this is set to anything other than 0. This is always been the case for me in all versions of Vegas I have ever used.

Good Luck

Bernie