[Bernie Lademann]

I have an update that may of interest, if people are still reviewing this thread looking for solutions.

This issue with the artifacts in the Mainconcept renderer seems to been addressed with a bug fix release build 563.

I didn’t see reference to this issue in the release notes for that release, so we are obviously getting “quiet” fixes for things that are broken, so it is still worth sending in problem reports, even if it appears that they are ignored.

[Bernie Lademann]

Hi Larry,

Yes, I set it to 1. (I have an 8 core CPU which should be able to operate on 16 threads at once.) I believe Vegas is not managing the threading correctly and the symptoms crop up in many places, this being the latest.

Cheers,

Bernie.

[Bernie Lademann]

Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. The older version of QuickTime did not solve it for me either. It was the multi-thread setting in Vegas that fixed it.
Bernie

[Bernie Lademann]

UPDATE: Unfortunately, for me, my older version of Quicktime crashes as well. It just takes a bit longer.

I don’t know what to try next. My problem has only come up with the lastest Vegas build (486) so I may have to revert to an older build to keep my clients happy.

[Bernie Lademann]

I have just tried to render to Quicktime format and crashed consistently.

Vegas 12 – Build 486
Quicktime 7.73.80.64

The only older version of Quicktime I could get my hands on was QT 7.6.6 which I installed to get the system working again.

Sony versus Apple -> customers lose every time!

[Bernie Lademann]

I too have found to my surprise that the MainConcept MP4 encoder is broken in this release. Yes I use a Quadro graphics card. Yes I have turned off GPU acceleration in the options and the render options.

I am encoding videos for iphone/ipod as part of my wedding video package and have my presets which work well in these devices.

I noticed when I upgraded from SVP 11 to 12, with the exact same presets, that the videos now have severe pixelation artifacts, especially with images which have movement and small objects. These were certainly not there in the previous release.

I run a commercial business and this has made this encoder for this release unusable. I have had to revert to using the Sony encoder to get output which is slightly lower quality by does not have these artifacts. For reference, I encode in 25 fps, but found that it doesn’t matter as setting to 29.9 fps makes no difference.

I have also checked the video output produced by the MainConcept encoder and it appears that some of the settings you set in the configuration for the encoder are ignored (for example the “reference frames”)

My advice, is stay clear of this encoder until its fixed.

[Bernie Lademann]

Yes, I run my Vegas now with GPU Acceration off as well. It does clear up most of the issues. It does make me wonder though, what Sony had in mind when they promoted that the product would run faster in any way whatsoever. Any crash or lockup = lost productivity. Any artifact in final render = lost productivity. Too much lost productivity and people change their production tools.

Ok, so Sony suggests using a professional graphics card, such as the Quadro. Mine is a Quadro 2000! I don’t get it. I am still keeping my fingers crossed that the next update/patch has a permanent stability fix. When this happens, it will be simply the best product on the market for video editing.

[Bernie Lademann]

To be exact, I have only tried Vegas with AVCHD footage shot in 1920×1080 50i, so I cannot comment about other types of footage. To Sony’s credit, I have not had to transcode the footage to another format to do editing, however, I have been able to work with this footage from Version 10 onwards and the GPU dependency problem described has crept in when this feature was initially added.

[Bernie Lademann]

I have had similar issues with Vegas Pro 11 and now with the recently installed Vegas Pro 12. I had a eureka moment yesterday when I upgraded the nVidia driver. I have a Quadro 2000 card and was running the 306.79 driver (and many previous drivers) and found that anything that involved the preview window being displayed would result in the eventual Vegas crash. In fact if you try to close the preview window completely and try to render you may get an instant crash! (Even when rendering using a codec which allows turning off the GPU acceleration)

When I upgraded the driver to 307.32 yesterday, it took much longer to crash (with nothing else changed on the Sony side). My conclusion is that most of the issues people are reporting about “GPU” acceleration can be narrowed down to the interaction of Vegas Pro with the video drivers. Unfortunately, with two big manufacturers involved it is easy to pass the blame on to the other party.

Let’s hope that we can get a “Partner Certified Driver” from nVidia in the future. In the short term, we should suggest to Sony that they allow us to “turn off preview update while rendering” in the options. This should get lot’s of people out of trouble.