I'm getting out my soap box... First I really appreciate everyone that's tried to help me on this forum. They are working to get customer support to be more responsive, for which I'm quite thankful. However, customer support is not responding.

I'm using Voukoder. Is kind of annoying, that software I paid for doesn't work. Voukoder isn't perfect solution, it's much slower, and the settings are somewhat confusing. However, it's getting me by at the moment as it doesn't glitch like the Magix render profiles.

Getting really discouraged with Vegas. I've been with them since 10 and purchased all the upgrades. I'd never roll a version with known issues, especially something as critical as video render which everybody needs to use to make a video. I have bought all these upgrades thinking they may have fixed the bugs but they never do. At this point they've made a couple grand off me and I'm loosing faith that they ever will resolve these issues in the software.

I have a buddy I collaborate with on many of my projects. He runs Premiere. I explained how unstable Vegas is for me to which he was surprised. He says Premiere virtually never crashes and the encoder works. I guess enough of my soapbox rant.

I agree on the urgency of addressing artifacts and glitches with rendering, and there are a number of other recent threads here about glitches with pictures black frames, etc.

If I were going to switch I find Resolve more compelling than Premiere as it's under very active development, really leverages good hardware (to a fault), and you only pay once. I like its DAW functionality and use Fairlight with VSTs that don't work in Vegas.

What settings are you using with Voukoder? x264 is slower but great quality for final renders. For NVENC, etc. I find it faster than MagixAVC. Maybe start a new thread for best settings for Voukoder and people more knowledgeable than myself can also chip in with their best settings for speed, quality, etc.
 

@RogerS thanks! Yeah this is a great community. I really appreciate the tips.

I need to take notes on my confusion with Voukoder. It works good, I think it was around high quality settings. I selected them and I don't think it compressed the video at all. I need to send that guy a tip / donation. I love it when people go to such ends to write software like that.

I've fiddled with Resolve. It's ROCK solid and I did enjoy it. The timeline is a bit different so I never took the time to get too in depth with it. I may need to work with it some more. It's on my machine as well as HitFilm which I bought and didn't ever learn. It bought it in a bundle for vegas efx / plugins.

I am working with Vegas Tech Support. They've had some difficulty recreating the issue on their end so last night I uploaded a timeline with transitions from a project that glitched. I also uploaded my render glitches. They are in the google drive folder linked below:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FfSvlhPDyS2QCCOjsq42mCuClR2S-3qq?usp=share_link

Anybody else have a project they'd like to share along with their system information? Maybe I could pass those on too.

And or, does the project I linked for you work? Or do you see the same render glitches?

Thanks!

@weinerschizel, can you set Dynamic RAM Preview to 0 and try rendering again? I had a similar issue that was fixed this way.

@Illusion that render was with dynamic ram preview set to zero. I tried it both ways, the result was different but in both cases had glitches.

On my laptop (GTX 1050 and integrated Intel HD 630 GPU) I see glitches in several parts of the VP 20 ad project when dynamic ram preview is set to a value greater than zero. You can download it here (and also benchmark your system performance) https://forms.gle/LJDdP2SDiWyB1BMk9

@weinerschizel

Downloaded your project and tested. One suggestion. In the future before uploading a project, please do a SaveAs to a new folder with "Copy media with project" ticked thus placing all assets in the same folder. This would avoid having to locate the numerous missing media.

I performed 6 different renders and could NOT reproduce your Glitch 2.mp4. They all worked perfectly. I performed 4 renders using HOS (x264-cpu, h264-qsv, hevc-qsv, and hevc-10bit-qsv) and 2 renders using Vegas (Magix AVC/UHD 2160-qsv and Magix HEVC/UHD 2160-qsv). Here's the MagixHEVC render.

My dynamic RAM was set to 1632MB.

Please note that I was using the really inexpensive Intel A380 card which I just recently purchased and installed for testing.

@wwaag thanks for running project... Wild I spent a good hour trimming up project and media. Thought I had that all squared away. Next time I'll just put all files in same folder as you suggested.

I was thinking of buying one of those A380 card. Maybe the Intel drivers don't invoke the glitch? I noticed same results with AMD 480x and Nvidia 2080 Ti.

@RogerS I had glitches with Dynamic RAM preview if set to zero or not. However, the glitch was different if I changed the dynamic RAM preview amount. Seems you have an Intel GPU in the CPU... did you use it to render? Not sure if you can select it for rendering... I don't have an integrated GPU.

You can use any GPU in three places, decoding, timeline playback and rendering. I use my Intel iGPU for decoding only. You can use it for encoding with the Intel QSV encoder (very fast but inefficient needing more bits for good AVC quality).

Interesting about dynamic ram preview, the glitches I see are dependent on it being greater than 0.

@RogerS oh that's awesome. I kind of wish I had an integrated GPU in my CPU but don't believe my socket supports any of those CPUs. I'm close to pulling the trigger on a Intel GPU for a second one per our other post. I've been looking at the a380 but not sure it would offer much of a boost in performance. My 2080 Ti still has a bit of headroom but seems to stumble on timeline play back when I add efx.

Back to the post, it seems you still can get render artifacts with Intel GPU setup as well from sound of your post. But setting to zero Dynamic RAM preview can fix that.

PS. I'm bolding, I've shared our post with Eric at Vegas Support.

@weinerschizel

An A380 will be MUCH worse for preview than your 2080ti. It's about the same as my 1050ti, maybe a bit worse. At the moment, it's value is for decoding 422 footage and GPU supported rendering for AV1 and VP9. I only purchased the card for HOS development and testing purposes.

The bottom line--if you want high quality renders with relatively low bit rates, just turn off your GPU and render using x264. You can do this using Voukoder (free) or HOS (paid).

Thanks for tip @wwaag. You verified some assumptions I had been wondering about. I'm going to share this post to continue conversation about hardware choices. https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/ultimate-vegas-pro-pc-build--138085/

Now I have an all together new issue with Magix AVC encoder for latest build of Vegas 20 Pro Build 326. I am testing with the GPU encoder.

The render gets to last frame, then won't release the file. It doesn't show crashed in task manager. It just sits there in a deadlock of some kind. I cannot close the render window, it doesn't indicate it's complete, and the software just sits there. The file isn't playable once I force a close through task manager.

Anybody else experiencing this new issue?

The 99%/100% stop encoding thing has been around for a decade. I personally have not experienced it for a long time, but also I use voukoder and mostly x264, so that bypasses 2 of Vegas's problems, MagixAVC/HEVC anything(or so it seems) and hardware encoding.

If it did encode your whole file, but failed at closing it, there is software that can close such files and make them playable(can't recall a name currently), although I"m not sure if Vegas leaves Vegas.mp4.part files, I'd presume it does

Interesting, first time I'd ever experienced it. Anybody know how to remedy the 99% encoding bug?

oh that's awesome. I kind of wish I had an integrated GPU in my CPU but don't believe my socket supports any of those CPUs. I'm close to pulling the trigger on a Intel GPU for a second one per our other post. I've been looking at the a380 but not sure it would offer much of a boost in performance. My 2080 Ti still has a bit of headroom but seems to stumble on timeline play back when I add efx.

Back to the post, it seems you still can get render artifacts with Intel GPU setup as well from sound of your post. But setting to zero Dynamic RAM preview can fix that.

PS. I'm bolding, I've shared our post with Eric at Vegas Support.

I do recommend Intel CPUs with iGPUs over the non-GPU variants (and bought one myself this fall!) 2080Ti is fine for Vegas and if you look at the Vegas 20 sample project benchmark see that for even reasonably Fx-heavy projects a fast CPU with that can hold its own. https://forms.gle/wKPpKxxmTVb1JkDKA

The artifacts appear unrelated to the Intel iGPU. They can be avoided entirely with dynamic ram preview set to zero. I didn't test with turning the preview acceleration (preference/video) off as well and think it's a continued issue with GPU timeline processing x dynamic ram preview. Dynamic ram preview x encoder (NVENC) was fixed in VP 19. On my new system glitches are not an issue but are a problem with the VP 20 sample project on my laptop. I also shared these findings with Vegas staff.

For renders stopping, not sure. Is there ample space on the OS drive as Vegas has to copy it there before finishing the file?

if you look at the Vegas 20 sample project benchmark see that for even reasonably Fx-heavy projects a fast CPU with that can hold its own. https://forms.gle/wKPpKxxmTVb1JkDKA

Did you try to render this sample project with DRAM set to 0%? It extremely slows down the rendering time (at least at my system).

Just want to note my desktop does not require this intervention to deliver a glitch-free file. It has a decent time for a new but not highest-end CPU (13th gen. i5) and $300-tier GPU.

Yes, turning off features like disabling dynamic ram preview or the GPU in preferences/video will significantly worsen render times. I did many such tests with the VP 16 sample project.

In the name of science, let me have my poor beleaguered laptop attempt to render this file without dynamic ram preview and add to the results. [Done] It took 21 min. to render vs 8:42 with dynamic ram preview enabled but had no glitches with a MagixAVC NVENC render unlike the render with it at 5%.

It took 21 min. to render vs 8:42 with dynamic ram preview enabled but had no glitches with a MagixAVC NVENC render unlike the render with it at 5%.

Probably disabling the GPU support in video settings will cause the same effect as lowering the DRAM settings to 0%. That's how I overcame those glitches when I had a none appropriate GPU.

It's pretty clear the issue is dynamic ram preview x GPU. (The GPUs in use are above the recommended minimums for VP 18+.)

Anyway the resulting time was 23:14 which was about 2 minutes longer than just zeroing out dynamic ram preview. No glitches in either case.

@RogerS good point on extra space on OS drive. I have 125GB free. It's an M.2 Samsung 980 drive, 512GB. That I would think be enough, however, one step ahead of you. I already ordered a 1TB Samsung 980 to swap in there.