In terms of codecs, ProRes is a very good choice really. There may be situations where DNxHR may be delivered by customers for example, maybe that is the case here. But what if the customer wishes to deliver ProResRaw, what still cannot be edited in Resolve under Windows? What would be the choice then?

Every system has some constrains, and I love Resolve to edit my BRAW really. But that does not mean that Vegas is not important for me any more.

I think there might still be licensing issues with Avid LE codecs for footage used professionally if created with a free unlicensed nle or transcoder.

Anything using QuickTime isn't a great option in Vegas. Try MagicAVC, ProRes, Grass Valley or another intermediate codec instead.

Resolve on Windows does not write ProRes without an unsupported third party which I have. Don't assume people are noobs, it comes across poorly. Avid is the standard in professional film production space. I work in professional post-production for indie filmmakers. MagicAVC and Grass Valley are not professional deliverables and you would be looked at funny delivering those to a post house on a film. Avid, MXF and ProRes are it for codecs.

In terms of codecs, ProRes is a very good choice really. There may be situations where DNxHR may be delivered by customers for example, maybe that is the case here. But what if the customer wishes to deliver ProResRaw, what still cannot be edited in Resolve under Windows? What would be the choice then?

Every system has some constrains, and I love Resolve to edit my BRAW really. But that does not mean that Vegas is not important for me any more.

I used Vegas as my primary NLE from 2002 until 2018. Premiere has too many issues, I don't like Avid so I use Resolve Studio now but I work with all of them as needed. Vegas has it's uses but during it's years at Sony it lost it's edge and Magix has kept it alive but not solved the underlying issues. I should know, I was a Vegas beta tester for many years.

I think there might still be licensing issues with Avid LE codecs for footage used professionally if created with a free unlicensed nle or transcoder.

Where did you hear such a thing? Without a watermark, how would anyone even know this? I'm delivering a DCP of a feature. The only ramifications are Magix as they are a small company simply does not want to pay Avid for codec rights.

I used Vegas as my primary NLE from 2002 until 2018. Premiere has too many issues, I don't like Avid so I use Resolve Studio now but I work with all of them as needed. Vegas has it's uses but during it's years at Sony it lost it's edge and Magix has kept it alive but not solved the underlying issues. I should know, I was a Vegas beta tester for many years.

Underlying issues has not been solved for Premiere too, and for Edius the ongoing development has become slow too. Resolve is sponsored by the other product sellings, that is right.

You have been a betatester for Vegas for many years? I have been too and I am, but what the owner invests in a product is his decision. Maybe it will be more in future, given the announcements that we have seen. But we will see.

https://www.magix.com/us/press/detail/news/magix-new-strategy/?_ga=2.99463326.1632053598.1684239316-582404277.1660227077&_gac=1.259978616.1683278653.Cj0KCQjw0tKiBhC6ARIsAAOXutnFDGhMqXOap_7XUwu2XtCLR8oIVEkY7l8YIJpX34PShaeb27AiM50aAsKmEALw_wcB

@Wolfgang S. thanks for the link. I just hope it's not "market-speak"...

What ever you mean by "market-speak"... but I am here really optimistic, since Vegas has a clear potential.

I agree about Vegas potential. I wouldn't own it and upgrade yearly if I didn't think it had potential. But I've seen lots of "market-speak", bold promises that were never fulfilled in the past with other products. Someone new comes in with a resume, says wonderful things about the future, and they never materialize.

But, I want to really be wrong on my pessimism...

The problem with the Avid LE Codecs are that they are 32 bit, with all the limitations one can expect.

One would be hard-pressed to find fault with the Avid 10 bit MXF codecs, even alongside ProRes.

 

You have been a betatester for Vegas for many years? I have been too and I am, but what the owner invests in a product is his decision. Maybe it will be more in future, given the announcements that we have seen. But we will see.

I quit beta testing I think during V17 or 18 when I moved full-time to Resolve Studio which I had been using for color and then I bought two BM cameras and started shooting BRAW.

And announcements do not a code-base rewrite make. Vegas still has most of it's core code from pre-2000. That's the heart of the problem. There are timelines features that it leads everyone but for heavy professional use, it does not cut the mustard. Premiere is buggy as hell but at least it can be used for high-end cinema work. Vegas cannot, not the video engine and not the audio engine (the new VST falls down quickly under heavy loads and no surround support other than 5.1.

I quit beta testing I think during V17 or 18 when I moved full-time to Resolve Studio which I had been using for color and then I bought two BM cameras and started shooting BRAW.

I shoot BRAW too - and to edit BRAW in Vegas is still cumbersome. Here I use Resolve too.

And announcements do not a code-base rewrite make.

Very true, but I think this will come.

 

And announcements do not a code-base rewrite make. Vegas still has most of it's core code from pre-2000. That's the heart of the problem. There are timelines features that it leads everyone but for heavy professional use, it does not cut the mustard.

It's why unlike pro editors or even consumer editors of today, Vegas color processing is in 8bit by default, and to understand why that is, you only need to turn on 32bit float precision and try to use it. All the other NLE's went exclusively 32 bit processing when adding GPU support, but Vegas couldn't do that because the render engine is so slow

* I think Premiere may have 8bit processing by default and 32bit processing as an option if not using a GPU, but with a GPU it's exclusively a 32bit pipeline.

FWIW the VST engine is now under active development as we can see with the addition of VST3 and mention elsewhere in this forum of performance/stability fixes coming in a next update.

I wouldn't be so quick to knock the Vegas video engine. It turns out substantially better quality metrics compared to Resolve. And holds it's own compared to ffmpeg, with ffmpeg itself doing all the analysis.

I agree on the need for more format support from Vegas. Not only more input formats like Av1, Braw v2, ProResRaw, zRaw, and native DNxHR. But also rendering DNxHR as well as lossless Hevc which I prefer as an intermediate... though I'd settle for lossless-av1 if Vegas could read it. I think Vegas once had presets for rendering DNxHD.

Btw, I did do some quality analysis on DNxHR is it's quite up there. Slightly better than ProRes counterparts. It also renders natively out of my zRaw converter quite briskly so I can deliver near-raw footage that way. But for my own purposes, I have a zRaw re-packager that spits out lossless hevc lightning fast. So I tend to use that. Because it's substantially smaller, almost everything can read it, and I've chosen hardware optimized to handle it.

I wouldn't be so quick to knock the Vegas video engine. It turns out substantially better quality metrics compared to Resolve. And holds it's own compared to ffmpeg, with ffmpeg itself doing all the analysis.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. You certainly can't use 32-bit 4K color processing in Vegas Pro for real-time playback and thus grading at that resolution cannot be done since you have to make all adjustment in 8-bit then turn on 32-bit for renders which is essentially useless. If you have some hard data to point to, by all means but since Resolve is used for mastering major Hollywood studio films, I sincerely doubt "quality of image" is problem area for Resolve otherwise it would have never become the product it is. I certainly have seen no evidence of this in mastering numerous projects over the years.

FWIW the VST engine is now under active development as we can see with the addition of VST3 and mention elsewhere in this forum of performance/stability fixes coming in a next update.

If I had a dollar for every time I was told as a user and beta tester about audio fixes coming, I could have bought a new machine. The Vegas audio engine was class leading until Sony got it and let it fall apart. I did a 5.1 mix on a feature film project in 2010 and it was a near impossible task. I did an IMAX short doc project in 5.1 in 2018 and that sealed the deal as it was a pretty simple mix (narration, music, some sound effects, no actors) and it bogged down on a ultra fast machine with a PCIe sound card. And unlike Resolve's Fairlight engine, there is no easy way to cache audio effects but keep them live so.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. You certainly can't use 32-bit 4K color processing in Vegas Pro for real-time playback and thus grading at that resolution cannot be done since you have to make all adjustment in 8-bit then turn on 32-bit for renders which is essentially useless. If you have some hard data to point to, by all means but since Resolve is used for mastering major Hollywood studio films, I sincerely doubt "quality of image" is problem area for Resolve otherwise it would have never become the product it is. I certainly have seen no evidence of this in mastering numerous projects over the years.

That's exactly how I do it with 4k multicam when I don't feel like using proxies and it works like a charm. With single camera 4k projects or HD multicam even in 32-bit project mode, Vegas grades as easily as Resolve and edits much more easily. I used to use Resolve for grading, bringing the luts back to Vegas, but now I don't bother. Speaking of which, Resolve exported luts are still one of it's strong points... Vegas needs to lose it's 33-pointers.

If Vegas lacked the 32-bit project option, as Resolve lacks it, you wouldn't ever have occasion to switch to a higher resolution back end before rendering. And render quality would be closer to Resolve's. Vegas would probably also have to resort to integer math to get down to Hollywood standards.

Anyone can do quality measurements themselves with a simple transcode starting with any lossless clip, comparing the input and output with ffmpeg. See my signature if you want to use my lossless hevc clip which both Vegas and Resolve can process. Or shoot your own. Avi lossless clips would be just as valid. If you don't know how to run the metrics yourself, there's also a link to a handy utility that'll do that for you too. There are also links to data I've collected over the years. Btw, I didn't say quality was a problem for Resolve... that's in the eye of the beholder. Just don't knock Vegas for being inferior when it's not.

If I had a dollar for every time I was told as a user and beta tester about audio fixes coming, I could have bought a new machine. 
 

If that is your experience and your deep beliefe - may I ask you what you wish us to do? Simply, I have no desire to convince you, what you beliefe and assume is up to you.

 

If Vegas lacked the 32-bit project option, as Resolve lacks it, you wouldn't ever have occasion to switch to a higher resolution back end before rendering. And render quality would be closer to Resolve's. Vegas would probably also have to resort to integer math to get down to Hollywood standards.

I mentioned above why Vegas defaults to 8bit, and has this 32bit processing as an option, it's because it's so slow, nobody would use it if it was purely a 32bit editor. Resolve doesn't have an 8bit mode because it's performance is so high at 32bit it doesn't require it, and this is true for about every other NLE in 2023.

It's alarming that you're painting a Vegas negative as a positive, it's such a weird thing to believe maybe I"M not understanding you correctly.

Anyone can do quality measurements themselves with a simple transcode starting with any lossless clip, comparing the input and output with ffmpeg.

You should do more tests, because you've formed an opinion that Resolve's render engine is 2nd rate, and further you seem to be creating a false reason for this, it's because it's 8bit processing?? None of that is true. What you most likely are talking about is it's default operation of it's H.264 encoder. But change some of those values and it's much better, but that still has nothing to do with the quality of it's render engine. Try some other codecs,

. Btw, I didn't say quality was a problem for Resolve... that's in the eye of the beholder. Just don't knock Vegas for being inferior when it's not.

At 4K H.264 / H.265 the output for the vast majority of Vegas users will often be low quality, much lower than Resolve depending on the material as most will be using MagixAVC/HEVC hardware encoding which can produce corrupted frames in many situations, and well respected forum user wwaag, developer of Happy Otter Scripts for Vegas Pro also says the same frame corruption  will occur with MagixAVC Mainconcept software encoding, and he's shown proof. The difference seems to be the hardware encoded version will have more corrupted frames at the same location as it takes longer to recover.

Another negative aspect to the bad Vegas encoding is that there's nothing wrong with either the mainconcept encoder nor the Intel/Amd/Nvidia hardware encoders, the problem seems to lay with the interfacing between the render engine and the encoders, it can't be the render engine it'self otherwise Voukoder would give just as poor results, and if Voukoder works so well, why can't they get their own encoders working correctly. It's very strange

So the positive is that there's Voukoder and HOS for encoding H.264/H.265, but the average customer most likely doesn't know about them nor would they fathom a need for them which is why we get so many people coming here complaining about the quality of their encodes.

@Former user I'm just calling it in accordance with the objective metrics which speak for themselves. To paraphrase Tyrion, "I benchmark. And I know things."

Btw, the quality metrics always decline when things don't match... they never ever go up. Misalignment and data corruption cannot be to blame since the exact same code in Resolve sparkles in ffmpeg. There's no other possible explanation for Resolve's consistently lower metrics on transcodes, other than a truncated pipeline; smaller data element size and/or lower math precision. I would conclude both if a Vegas 8-bit project transcode returned higher metrics than Resolve. Particularly if Resolve was still quicker. Which I'm pretty sure was the case. There I go again. This time turning one of your positives into a negative. But not really. Because it's just a question of priorities and each to their own. Quality comes first for me because that's all they have to go by when I deliver. Of course I want to eat my cake and have it too. So I do my best with performance metrics to make more intelligent hardware choices and optimally tune what I've got. But not at the expense of quality. Because once that gets sacrificed, there's no getting it back. And the quicker my hardware gets, the more performance gaps shrink and become relatively less important to me.

@Former user I'm just calling it in accordance with the objective metrics which speak for themselves. To paraphrase Tyrion, "I benchmark. And I know things."

Btw, the quality metrics always decline when things don't match... they never ever go up. Misalignment and data corruption cannot be to blame since the exact same code in Resolve sparkles in ffmpeg. There's no other possible explanation for Resolve's consistently lower metrics on transcodes, other than a truncated pipeline; smaller data element size and/or lower math precision. I would conclude both if a Vegas 8-bit project transcode returned higher metrics than Resolve. Particularly if Resolve was still quicker. Which I'm pretty sure was the case. There I go again. This time turning one of your positives into a negative. But not really. Because it's just a question of priorities and each to their own. Quality comes first for me because that's all they have to go by when I deliver. Of course I want to eat my cake and have it too. So I do my best with performance metrics to make more intelligent hardware choices and optimally tune what I've got. But not at the expense of quality. Because once that gets sacrificed, there's no getting it back. And the quicker my hardware gets, the more performance gaps shrink and become relatively less important to me.

So that's a long, confusing way to say "I don't have any actual data"? Honestly, I have no idea what you are talking about.