@Howard-Vigorita as senior technical expert for this forum, what are you recommendations for when and when not to use Voukoder with Vegas?

I"m still shell shocked by this developing news. The fact you can see the difference with your eyes is most concerning.

Senior technical expert? Ha, ha, senior, maybe. When it comes to video, I'm still learning. I consider Voukoder an ffmpeg gui. It's ffmpeg that's the wizard behind the curtain. Voukoder Pro is pretty remarkable, too, as a rather slick gui. It's still in beta but once he gets all the render libs back in, it'll be something. I just don't like that he's expiring the betas because some of the earlier ones had more libs in them.

I like that Voukoder brings ffmpeg power to Vegas as a render engine. It just needs it's input pipe unclogged. I use it primarily to render all the formats Vegas developers haven't gotten to yet. If they opened up the plugin input channel for FrameServer too, that would be even better for me because I could pipe Vegas output into ffmpeg my ffmpeg render scripts without a quality penalty.

It's only the larger quality differences that stand out to my old eyes. I like doing screening with clients. Always fascinated by how much more I see when I preview with others.

@Howard-Vigorita It was before my time, but there used to be something called frame server? and that channeled output from Vegas into a different encoder. I'm not sure what was the purpose but maybe the same use as voukoder it gave more access to codecs and expected high quality encodes. Does that also have the same bandwidth limitations as voukoder?

I added UT codec to my list, I could only use 422 on Resolve as 444 would create tiny low quality files. Vegas UT 444 does work, but it is apparently of lower quality than 422 so I didn't add it. I should have though, maybe it would make sense to you, much larger file, but allegedly lower quality

there used to be something called frame server? and that channeled output from Vegas into a different encoder

@Former user The latest free FrameServer is here. It uses the same Vegas plugin facility as any other-3rd party Vegas plugin. The FrameServer plugin allows piping the Vegas render stream to other stand-alone render apps that support AviSynth input streams. That includes ffmpeg and Rigaya encoders. Latest AviSynth is here.

I finally made some progress on my effort to work out away to import Canon CRM Raw into Vegas and compare it in quality to Davinci Resolve. I had to change my naming convention for transcode-output clips because Resolve apparently cannot see files whose names start with a dot. I also re-designed my dpx to lossless hevc powershell script to easily and consistently trancode to 4 lossless resolutions as well as 4 smaller near-lossless clips. Here's the script:

# pick a switch-number from 1 to 4 for pixel format..
switch (1) {
    1 { $pfmt = 'yuv420p10le' }
    2 { $pfmt = 'yuv422p10le' }
    3 { $pfmt = 'yuv420p12le' }
    4 { $pfmt = 'yuv422p12le' }
}
# uncomment to enable near-lossless hevc
#$c = '_crf0'
switch ($pfmt) {
    'yuv420p10le'    { $out = '0ut_10bit-hevc420'+$c+'.mp4' }
    'yuv420p12le'    { $out = '0ut_12bit-hevc420'+$c+'.mp4' }
    'yuv422p10le'    { $out = '0ut_10bit-hevc422'+$c+'.mp4' }
    'yuv422p12le'    { $out = '0ut_12bit-hevc422'+$c+'.mp4' }
    Default        { 'Unexpected format selection: '+$pfmt; pause; exit }      
}
$msg = 'pix_fmt = ' + $pfmt; echo $msg
if ($c -ne '_crf0') { $msg = 'True lossless hevc enabled' 
} else { $msg = 'Near lossless hevc enabled' }; echo $msg
$msg = 'output file = ' + $out; echo $msg

# uncomment to see variable construction without running ffmpeg
#pause; exit
measure-command {
if ($c -ne '_crf0') {
ffmpeg -hide_banner -f image2 -framerate 29.97 -i rgb16_%08d.dpx -bufsize 2G -c:v libx265 -x265-params "keyint=1:lossless=1" -pix_fmt $pfmt -bsf:v hevc_metadata=video_full_range_flag=1 -y $out
} else {
ffmpeg -hide_banner -f image2 -framerate 29.97 -i rgb16_%08d.dpx -bufsize 2G -c:v libx265 -crf 0 -pix_fmt $pfmt -bsf:v hevc_metadata=video_full_range_flag=1 -y $out
}
}
pause

Here's how the lossless hevc clips stack up against one another:

Oddly, vp21 build 208 was only able to read the 4:2:2 lossless hevc files but not lossless 4:2:0. Resolve was able to read all 4 so I compared both using the higher res 12-bit inputs with Resolve using CRM directly. Although the quality results from Resolve with CRM input was the highest I've ever seen from it, Vegas was better.