Simple solution: Just use Voukoder (as 3POINT also suggested). https://www.voukoder.org/

MagixAVC with Mainconcept is fine with enough bitrate. I'm less impressed with QSV. For final renders I often use x264 through Voukoder with a CQ of 19 or so.

MagixAVC with Mainconcept is fine with enough bitrate. I'm less impressed with QSV. For final renders I often use x264 through Voukoder with a CQ of 19 or so.

Using too low CQ settings, can/may result in very/too high peak bitrates in scenes with much motion and details (like moving waves or grass/leaves etc). Not every TV is able to play those peak bitrates, resulting in a hampering play. Check first the max bitrate your TV can play, my TV has a max bitrate of 100Mbps, which is easily gone beyond that with a CQ setting of 19. Even the default Voukoder CQ setting of 23 exceeds that sometimes.

I personally prefer X265 NV supported with a CQ setting of 25 for play at my Home TV.

For uploading purposes, like to Youtube, it's better to upload a less compressed render and therefore it's also better to use very high bitrates. Youtube will always re-encode your upload.

@nancyrry I recently tested hd x264/avc with Voukoder compared with Magix MainConcept and got the best results overall with Voukoder set to crf18 yielding a 15-mbps bitrate. I'd expect x265/hevc to be even better. See:

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/can-someone-suggest-me-a-suitable-settings-for-h-264-voukoder--146965/

If you use hardware to accelerate rendering, such as Nvidia or Qsv, render will be quicker but quality suffers. Same if you go for smaller, lower bitrate renders. 15-mbps is only marginally higher than the Magix 12-mbps defaults for hd and looks pretty good even for avc.

Btw, what I do is to always render 4k hevc for YouTube uploads which looks significantly better even if viewed hd. That's partly because YouTube always gives 4k the vp9 treatment. For 4k, Magix MainConcept Hevc is tops. But rendering takes significantly longer if the project is set to 4k and AI Upscale is dropped onto each hd event for the best upscaling. I usually render 4k for YouTube at 28-mbps cbr.

@Howard-Vigorita​ ​​​​​​ With rendering with a CQ setting, you never can predict a resulting average bitrate, it's totally dependent on the movement and the details in your video.

...and want to ensure they look sharp and professional when uploaded online.

That's the 10,000 pound elephant in the room. We editors have very little control over what happens to our video once it hits the online servers and gets processed to mediocre quality, in order to keep from clogging up their data stream. Most of these services have little interest in maintaining your source quality. Vimeo is an exception.

If you will upload some of your original 1080p video (not something you rendered in Vegas) to Drive or Dropbox, post the download link here, and name the online services you wish to use, you will get some good and some not-so-good opinions from this forum. That's about all I can promise.

@nancyrry

OK, Here is a one way solution. If you wanna try.

Download this script

Quick Render by iEmby Package

Copy its both files and paste into VEGAS Script Menu Folder in My Documents

Install Voukoder Setup Files from INSTALL Voukoder Folder

Copy & Paste Render Templates Folder at

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\VEGAS\

Now

Open VEGAS Pro and try AutoRenders.

@Howard-Vigorita​ ​​​​​​ With rendering with a CQ setting, you never can predict a resulting average bitrate, it's totally dependent on the movement and the details in your video.

@3POINT One cannot draw valid quality conclusions comparing strategies unless the bitrates match. Because quality tends to go up when bitrate goes up. Limited of course by the quality of the source.

Btw, Constant Quality (CP) is Nvidia hardware encoder rate control strategy similar to x264/5 CRF. All hardware encoders I've tested produced lower quality than software encoders like x264 or x265. Which for hd, seems to be as good as it gets. I do my test renders with gpu hardware because it's quicker. But always switch to highest quality rendering for the final.

@Howard-Vigorita​ ​​​​​​ With rendering with a CQ setting, you never can predict a resulting average bitrate, it's totally dependent on the movement and the details in your video.

@3POINT One cannot draw valid quality conclusions comparing strategies unless the bitrates match. Because quality tends to go up when bitrate goes up. Limited of course by the quality of the source.

I agree with @3POINT on this question -- raising the bitrate past optimal will not increase quality, only file size and handling difficulties. The CQ algorithm is quite good at nailing that optimal point when run in the 18-20 range.

An example what too low CRF settings can cause:

My original footage is a 2160p50 recording with 100Mbps.

than compare following bitrates graphs of x264 (software) rendering with CRF17, CRF23 (Voukoder default) and CRF25. Especially take a look at peak bitrates. Does it makes sense to generate bitrates that are far above the original bitrate? On my 4kTV with 100Mbps max, only the CRF25 render is playable.

@Howard-Vigorita You're right that CQ is the hardware equivalent of CRF software rendering, I also use CQ for test and CRF for final rendering and mix up sometimes the CQ and CRF expressions.

Don't forget in your Project Properties to change Full-resolution rendering quality to BEST. That little cog wheel above Video Preview on the upper left.

Don't forget in your Project Properties to change Full-resolution rendering quality to BEST. That little cog wheel above Video Preview on the upper left.

AFAIK This best setting has not directly an influence on the render quality of the video but influence on how better scaling and resampling etc are calculated while rendering, when used. It's the same setting as seen in the preview settings.

Quality: Best
Scaling: bi-cubic/integration
Field Handling: on
Field Rendering: on (setting dependent)
Framerate Resampling: on (switch dependent)
Interlace Flicker Reduction: on (switch dependent)
Proxies: no

Quality: Good
Scaling: bi-lineair
Field Handling: on
Field Rendering: on (setting dependent)
Framerate Resampling: on (switch dependent)
Interlace Flicker Reduction: on (switch dependent)
Proxies: no

Quality: Preview
Scaling: bi-lineair
Field Handling: off
Field Rendering: off
Framerate Resampling: off
Interlace Flicker Reduction: off
Proxies: yes

Quality: Draft
Scaling: point sampling
Field Handling: off
Field Rendering: off
Framerate Resampling: off
Interlace Flicker Reduction: off
Proxies: yes

Also some interesting articles to read about this subject: https://slhck.info/video/2017/02/24/crf-guide.html and https://slhck.info/video/2017/03/01/rate-control.html