Avid Codec Support Clarification for V20

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 5/19/2023, 11:24 AM

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

@Former user Voukoder's quality suffers in the same way as Resolve's but for a different reason. It's a plugin and the data feed from Vegas to a plugin is currently truncated. In fact, quality metrics from Voukoder as a Vegas plugin are almost identical as a Resolve Studio plugin. And similar to native Resolve renders. Vegas plugins apparently do not get the full 32-bit float-feed that native Vegas render presets enjoy in 32-bit projects. Same deal with FrameServer and Magic YUV last time I looked. I really wish Vegas would update it's render plugin api and make the sdk public... Voukoder would surely benefit. The developer has indicated publicly that the sky would be the limit if he had a better feed. Although I would settle for Vegas building in a native full-feed AviSynth connection to directly chain to external apps like ffmpeg.

Btw, is there a Vegas plugin to render Avid formats? Voukoder doesn't do it. Neither does ffmpeg, far as i know... it currently reads it but I keep hearing that might be going away.

Wouldn't a full-feed Vegas public plugin sdk be cool? We could all write our own open-source plugins and take a load off of overworked Vegas developers. Even for formats Vegas developers won't touch, like Avid. Ha, ha, @jetdv could have a field-day with the tutorials. If he ever gets that chance, I'd be right there.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 5/19/2023, 11:53 AM

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.

As I mentioned earlier, see my signature for the ffmetrics charts I've been running for years. Don't take my word for anything... get the app also linked and run them yourself to verify. Or fire up ffmpeg yourself and run it without the app. Just in case anything changed in the world since I last did this, which admittedly has been a while, I just reran a few renders on my laptop with the latest and greatest Vegas vp20 b403, Resolve Studio 18.5b16, and ffmpeg v6:

The last 2 items are not renders... they're direct extractions from my camera's raw converter which supports both lossless hevc and avid. The almost perfect score for DNxHR is noteworthy because the zRaw format uses hevc 420 lossless as it's native compression format capturing off it's Sony Exmore sensor which is also 420 in it's pixel striping... it's curious that both psnr and ssim deduct a slight bit for the 420 to 422 upscale which vmaf ignores. Fwiw, DNxHR is the highest quality render I can get off of Resolve, assuming I'm doing it right. If you can get better results, I'd appreciate it if you shared your settings with me... I only use Resolve for limited things and am a long ways off from being any kind of expert with it.

stephenv2 wrote on 5/19/2023, 2:36 PM

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.

As I mentioned earlier, see my signature for the ffmetrics charts I've been running for years. Don't take my word for anything... get the app also linked and run them yourself to verify. Or fire up ffmpeg yourself and run it without the app. Just in case anything changed in the world since I last did this, which admittedly has been a while, I just reran a few renders on my laptop with the latest and greatest Vegas vp20 b403, Resolve Studio 18.5b16, and ffmpeg v6:

The last 2 items are not renders... they're direct extractions from my camera's raw converter which supports both lossless hevc and avid. The almost perfect score for DNxHR is noteworthy because the zRaw format uses hevc 420 lossless as it's native compression format capturing off it's Sony Exmore sensor which is also 420 in it's pixel striping... it's curious that both psnr and ssim deduct a slight bit for the 420 to 422 upscale which vmaf ignores. Fwiw, DNxHR is the highest quality render I can get off of Resolve, assuming I'm doing it right. If you can get better results, I'd appreciate it if you shared your settings with me... I only use Resolve for limited things and am a long ways off from being any kind of expert with it.

Thanks for the clarification, my ad blocker was not showing all your links and stuff, my bad. DNxHR can be set to fully lossless but you can also get identical results (checked via difference mode) with TIFF, Open EXR, 32-bit PNG and several of the other uncompressed or lossless format. ProRes via Voukoder works as well and not seen any quality issues there either. full vs. limited levels are sometimes a factor. Plus you can run Resolve on Mac and Linux for other options including native ProRes on Mac. The comparisons you posted favor lossy codecs which are not suitable as intermediates. And I NEVER render 8-bit now even for client web files, those are 10-bit MP4 files always now. The inability of Vegas to natively work 32-bit is showstopper. I don't expect that to change anytime soon but would be happy to be proven wrong.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 5/20/2023, 10:18 AM

@stephenv2 Not sure why you get such poor Vegas performance grading 32-bit projects. I don't. It's a little more demanding but not a show stopper. Might have to do with your particular hardware. Just a guess... your signature has no info on what you're running or what you're shooting.

Also, is Aces involved? Might be unintentionally involved if you shoot full-range and switch to 32-bit full without disabling Aces view-transform and restoring gamma. Had that problem myself till it got explained to me.

stephenv2 wrote on 5/20/2023, 10:52 AM

@stephenv2 Not sure why you get such poor Vegas performance grading 32-bit projects. I don't. It's a little more demanding but not a show stopper. Might have to do with your particular hardware. Just a guess... your signature has no info on what you're running or what you're shooting.

Also, is Aces involved? Might be unintentionally involved if you shoot full-range and switch to 32-bit full without disabling Aces view-transform and restoring gamma. Had that problem myself till it got explained to me.

32-bit should be native and Vegas 32-bit performance is poor, even on high end hardware it's far behind other pro NLEs. Right now I only use Vegas for DCP audio output so my hardware is irrelevant so I don't bother to list specs. I work with all sorts of footage from all cameras as I do professional film post work and VFX primarly. It's not my systems, it's Vegas.