Be careful with your choice of encoder options with Vegas Pro 20

SnarfConsortium wrote on 5/15/2023, 12:13 PM

Just figured out a long time issue I have been having with Vegas Pro 20 and wanted to share in case anyone else was having a similar issue. My issue was Vegas not recognizing multiple audio tracks in recordings and would only show the first track when imported to the timeline. Turns out its the choice of encoder that is messing things up. My test is below:

Downloaded Vegas Pro 20 on build 403 (latest build at time of test). All test files were recoded using OBS's CQP rate control set to 20 with the preset set to Slow and tuning set to High Quality.

Test 1 was NVIDIA NVENC H.264 as the encoder
Test 2 was NVIDIA NVENV HEVC as the encoder

Both files were imported into Vegas Pro 20 and can be seen in the below screen shot

On test 1 we can see that the video track is there as well as the other 6 audio tracks. On test 2 the Video track is there, but only the first audio track. Both files are 10 seconds long with the only difference being their encoder of choice. Test 1 with H.264 is 6339KB and Test 2 with HEVC is 4679KB. Video and audio quality were recorded with the same settings and we are seeing around a 26% decrease in file sizes. Both files are uploaded below for your own reference.

I also imported these files into Premiere Pro and Davinci, both were able to recognize the multiple audio tracks with no issues.

Glad that I was able to figure out why my recordings seemed incompatible with Vegas Pro, sad to see that I have to give up the smaller file sizes to edit with it. Hopefully this helps anyone else that has also been running into this problem.

Comments

Former user wrote on 5/15/2023, 6:07 PM

Screen shot the settings/output/recording page in OBS. I tried this with Nvenc HEVC, recording direct to MP4, as well as auto remuxing to MP4, but all 6 tracks showed in Vegas

SnarfConsortium wrote on 5/15/2023, 7:05 PM

Screen shot the settings/output/recording page in OBS. I tried this with Nvenc HEVC, recording direct to MP4, as well as auto remuxing to MP4, but all 6 tracks showed in Vegas

Attached are my settings used for the tests. The only thing I changed between the tests was the choice of encoder. I am using OBS 29.0.2, can you post what settings you use that Vegas Pro can see all 6 audio tracks? I have a bunch of stuff that was encoded using HEVC at the moment that can't be used in Vegas Pro due to the audio issues I mentioned above.

fr0sty wrote on 5/15/2023, 7:25 PM

One thing to keep in mind, yes, HEVC has a smaller file size, but it is a much more complex codec to decode, so you'll get better performance using H264 for editing (and this is true in any app). While there are hardware decoders that can help this, if you're editing multiple streams at once, even those can get overloaded easier. H264 is a much more editor-friendly format to use.

Former user wrote on 5/15/2023, 8:21 PM

@SnarfConsortium Make sure you DON'T have Legacy HEVC decoding ticked in File I/O settings, that is likely your problem.

If you are experiencing crashing and blame the GPU decoder you could turn off GPU decoder in File I/O settings, leaving Legacy HEVC unticked. I haven't tested that but should work.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 5/15/2023, 9:29 PM

@SnarfConsortium Curious if you tried any other Magix Hevc presets like QSV or MainConcept.

SnarfConsortium wrote on 5/15/2023, 11:55 PM

@SnarfConsortium Make sure you DON'T have Legacy HEVC decoding ticked in File I/O settings, that is likely your problem.

If you are experiencing crashing and blame the GPU decoder you could turn off GPU decoder in File I/O settings, leaving Legacy HEVC unticked. I haven't tested that but should work.

Turns out that I did indeed have that option ticked and it was causing my problem. HEVC encoded video now loads all audio streams just fine like the h.264 encoded video.