Many thanks Roger. Noticed the Voukoder saturation difference when I first used it comparing it to the Sony AVC I was using when making BluRay. My daughter in law who is a professional editor could see it this morning when comparing the clips on the tv. Maybe the HEVC is the way to go for me for quality vs file size. I need to tryout various settings to find the sweet spot.

I also never noticed a saturation difference with Voukoder (my favourite).

Just for fun also render your 4k project to FHD with Voukoder 23 CRF setting and compare both renders (4k and FHD) on your 4k TV. At what viewing distance do you see a difference/no difference?

I just did a comparison for someone else on another thread with a still image. Taking a screenshot of MagixAVC with Mainconcept and NVENC vs Voukoder there weren't differences in hue or saturation.

Just did a test from a Sony X-AVCS with Voukoder and MagixAVC/Mainconcept and brought both back into Vegas. I see no difference visually or on the vectorscope between the original file or the two renders.

I'll keep an eye out and see if that is an issue in the future.

It seems the difference is only on the TV (this is same when on a FHD 50in Plasma and 65in 4K Oled at 3m distance. It looks the same on the PC. The renders were full range both in Vegas project and in render templates. The TV must be treating something differently between the two.

Most video files are video range (16-235) so I'd export as such for playback on a TV.

Thanks. I have decided to go with HEVC to keep file size down, what sort of bit rate should I be looking for for 4K, 25P video? I see Voukoder also has HEVC options I will try that also and compare.

High enough to avoid visible artifacts and maybe 1/3 the size of what the AVC would be?

Voukoder lets you go by quality so maybe start in the 20-23 range and see what kind of bitrate it ends up as.

I don't do much with HEVC myself as my files tend to get played back on a range of devices I don't control.

@andyrpsmith Suggest you aim for no more than the maximum bitrate of your source media. If your tv can handle hevc, you can discount the avc source bitrate by around 20% to save some media space. Also pay attention to the bit-depth... if the xavc source media is 10-bit and you render default Magix hevc 8-bit, and that looks good to you, you can adjust bitrate downward for that too. The Nvenc, MC, and x265 hevc templates generally let you choose between 8- and 10-bit renders.

Modern oled tvs handle full range video pretty well and often automatically map video range into full for deeper blacks. Not sure if they're all smart enough to detect the video range and adjust on the fly. You might be statically optimized for watching media at video levels.

Thanks Howard, my media is the old Sony XAVCS 8 bit and recorded at 100Mb/s, easy to edit as Vegas knows it from the old Sony days. This is a major step for me moving from BluRay to something else as I know BluRay players will quickly dwindle away as every one stores their media via non optical methods.

@andyrpsmith

1) If I had more than one friend or relative, I wouldn't use HEVC for archiving. Grandma is not going to have a TV that will play HEVC, while she might have a TV from Wal-Mart that can pay AVC.

2) I also would not trade machine render time to save disk space.

In Voukoder, I rendered a sports video that has 100% camera movement to follow the action with the following results:

The default CRF 23 is likely fine, but somewhere between CRF 20 and 23 is the sweet spot. A personal tic that I have is with the default GOP of 250. I usually change it to something from this solar system like 30 or 15. "Damn the bit rate full speed ahead."

All of my usual disclaimers especially apply to this comment.

Many thanks for the comments John, we are the grandparents, the last to go smart TV 4K.

@andyrpsmith  Just start with the default Voukoder AVC template (video project default, audio project default) which is CRF 23. Don't worry about bitrates, framerates, resolution etc. This template is for 99% for all output the ideal setting. Quality and filesize is viewable better and mostly smaller than when encoding with Magix AVC/HEVC.

For the 1% cases you can start tweaking CFR, GOP etc., but to avoid problems like too high max bitrates (resulting in choppy play) etc. First always start with the default template.

Thanks 3Point will try the options. Just for fun tried the new AV1 codec in Voukoder, wow 59Mb file size, took 4.5mins for 2min project at the ludicrous speed setting. Played back fine on TV but there were some small blocky artefacts. Trying a good quality setting was going to take a very long time at least an hour or more. The internet says AV1 needs heavy computing power. Good to know it can be played back. I think Netflix are using it for some content. It is supposed to replace HEVC.

Starting with the default Voukoder render settings, here is the result of changing GOP from 250 to 30, keyint minimum from 25 to 15. Peak and average bit rates increased because I frames contain a full 8.3 megapixels of data while P and B frames are shorthanded.

All of my usual disclaimers continue to apply to this comment.

LG's 8K TVs from 2020 are also AV1 compatible with a decoder built into the α9 (Gen 3) processor. This is why I think my TV can play it as it has the a9 gen 3 processor although it is only 4K.

Thanks John, trying to get my head round the GOP stuff.

@andyrpsmith

"... trying to get my head round the GOP stuff."

It affects the ability of a player to navigate within a video. If you sit and watch a program without stopping, it doesn't matter. If you seek within a video to a specific scene, at GOP=250 (30FPS), you can only get within 8.3 seconds of your target. At GOP=30 you can get within 1 second of your target. One of Blu-ray's strong points was navigation.

99.2047510% of the people on the planet don't care about anything I just said.

PS

@3POINT Voukoder CRF=20 files play choppy from a SanDisk USB drive on my ancient Sony XBR-49X850B

@andyrpsmith 

Playability isn't everything; it is the only thing.

First, and most important, especially if you will be sharing your masterpieces with others, is the delivery medium. AVC and HEVC are close to 100% deliverable, AV1 and VP9 less so.

Second, there is the SSQ axis. Size, Speed, Quality, pick two. You want the best quality that will play and stream smoothly on a majority of systems without growing old waiting for it to render.

HEVC is smaller (more compressed) than AVC, but takes more time to encode, and uses more computing power to play back, so some recipients may experience playback stutters. HEVC is best with UHD encodes, it is really not needed for FHD (10810p).

Likewise, machine encoders (NVENC, AMD, QSV) encode faster, but produce much larger files for "comparable" quality, which is really self-deception. Impatient teenagers and their aging counterparts tend to like these encoders a lot.

So you can see that your choice depends on your goals and individual personality. Making those choices clearer is part of my goal here.

 

@3POINT Voukoder CRF=20 files play choppy from a SanDisk USB drive on my ancient Sony XBR-49X850B

Lower CRF settings can cause peak bitrates beyond the specs of your TV, resulting in choppy play. As said before always start with default CRF23 template before starting to tweak.

Despite the popularity of hardware encoders (I have access to AMD and Intel), I find the fantastic speed is ENTIRELY offset by the bloated file sizes and - even worse - plainly visible artifacting in complex scenes even with the bloated file size. Certainly fine for previewing, but not for final delivery / archival.

I continue to swear by software/CPU encoding. Absolutely the best quality and file size you’ll get, but there’s a heavy penalty to pay with rendering time. I’m running a 12900K and it’s still slow to render, although I personally feel that’s some poor efficiency with Vegas processing on my particular usage as the CPU is often idling at 10-30% while it’s chunking along. Not sure where the bottleneck is… it’s not a GPU thing, definitely not a storage bottleneck… maybe memory? Or maybe it’s just a single threaded thing.

Thanks John, trying to get my head round the GOP stuff.

Long GOPs are a compression trick, nothing else. B-frames take up almost no space, since they are just road signs, not fully encoded images. GOPs that are too long create smaller files with collateral which includes motion degradation and seek times, as John mentioned. They take longer to encode and decode, but stream faster.

FWIW the settings I use in Voukoder are identical to what John uses.
Lowering the GOP also helps if you ever want to bring the videos back into Vegas and put them into a new project.

As the thread says, I use Voukoder default settings only for final renders. I would never use such renders for further editing.