1. Sorry, I meant Vegas Pro 20
2. MAGIX AVC/AAC MP4, 2160 x 3840, 24FPS, 81,000,000 Max and Average bps, Mainconcept AVC, H264_CBR, everything else is default
3. Project Settings are 2160 x 3840, 24 fps, everything else is default
4. 11700k CPU, 3090 GPU, 64GB of ram, GeForce 532.03 Release Date 05/24/2023

Thanks for the Info
Do you have other templates with Magix AVC?
You are using now the Mainconcept which is not the newest and best
My choice would be to use Magix AVC Internet UHD 2160 p with NVENC or QSV
Another choice for good rendering is to use Voukoder.
BTW. your driver for the Nvidia GPU is the gamedriver, but the builders of Vegas advice to use the Studio driver, in this case nr. 531.61

I managed to find NVENC, I cannot find QSV anywhere
Or Voukoder
If you have any more information on either of those that would be great.

At the moment I've split up all these clips into 10 second of less segments because I need to mask them over in Adobe After Effects, but I will be combining them together into the final product tomorrow in Vegas 20 so, I will reply then as to whether or not this solved my issue, a long render will be crucial of course.

Vegas pro 17 doesn't have this issue with the same encoder on my current driver, just for the record.

I managed to find NVENC, I cannot find QSV anywhere

Your CPU has an Intel® UHD Graphics 750 on it for QSV rendering/decoding
When it does not show up in your Taskmanager you have to allow this on in the BIOS and after that you can use it in your software.
 

Or Voukoder

Voukoder is a third party tool for rendering, look here: https://www.voukoder.org/

Upset because I've just purchased this Sony Vegas Pro 20 product for $200 and... my renders are giving me random black frames which of course makes the renders unusable...

Sony Vegas 17 which I also have does not do this at all. The only reason I really upgraded was so I could do this project which is a vertical video project, because Sony Vegas 17 cannot render past 2304 in height...

Is there some solution to these black frame problems?

The only work around I current have is to continue rendering the footage over and over until it doesn't have any black frames...

I get that, I tried the old fix of setting dynamic ram cache to zero. This hurts timeline and encoding performance but it could still be a reasonable option for encode if it fixed the problem. It doesn't.

It's a Vegas bug they need to fix. I would guess if you turned the GPU off the black frames would go away but that's unacceptable to me. I get the problem on random camera and other sourced files. I also encoded my own Vegas friendly x264 file with a GOP of 60, and also got the black frames.

Things you could try, setting dynamic ram preview to 0, turning GPU decoder OFF, turning GPU processing OFF.

I'd try what Todd suggests. Either turning off GPU in preferences/video or setting dynamic ram preview to 0MB should help. There's likely less of a performance hit to turning dynamic ram preview to 0. If it still doesn't fix it, try both. If that still fails then also turn GPU decoding off in preferences/file io.

QSV encoding may not show up if you have more than one monitor enabled. Mainconcept is a fine choice though- better quality for the bitrate.

The best error free render alternative for Vegas is already mentioned: Voukoder.

I don't know if this will help but if you do not already have this turned on try options Quantize to frames and check both enable quantize to frames and show unquantized event edges. This will show a red line on any event edges not matched together - ie have black/blank frames, a good way to check your project.

I really appreciate all the advice you guys : ), I'll have to try those things.
"My choice would be to use Magix AVC Internet UHD 2160 p with NVENC"

This type of render seemed to work perfectly!

However, these black frames are still appearing in my preview window, like, when I'm trying to edit the video and I hit play to check it out for a bit I will get these black frames occasionally. So I suppose I'll have to try some of these other methods you all mentioned.

However, I do not want to have it using my CPU instead of my GPU... when I have a 3090 with 24GB of vram specifically for this type of thing..., and I also don't want to set my normal ram to 0, I've done that before in Vegas 17 to try and fix some stuff and I really dislike not having it remember any of the video...

If anyone else has any more suggestions that would hit the nail on the head here that would be great, I imagine it's got to be something as simple as changing the render to NVENC since that worked so well yeah?

 

However, these black frames are still appearing in my preview window, like, when I'm trying to edit the video and I hit play to check it out for a bit I will get these black frames occasionally.

Can you give screenshots of Options/Preferences/Video and Opt/Pref/File I/O?

This fix may be just lucky- if the black frames are due to decoding problems (that they show up in preview suggests they are) so you may well see them again with NVENC encoding.

Your 11700k CPU's iGPU is better for decoding than your NVIDIA card in VEGAS so make sure it's enabled in bios and QSV is selected over NVDEC in preferences file io. The NVIDIA can handle the timeline and NVENC encoding if you like (though QSV is a bit faster).

If you still have black frames after that I'm going to conclude there's a media issue and suggest re-encoding for use in Vegas. Share MediaInfo for more specific advice: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-how-to-post-mediainfo-and-vegas-pro-file-properties--104561/

if you are rendering in 32-bit and using the color curves fx, see:

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/32-bit-video-renders-brightness-flickering--138356/

This fix may be just lucky- if the black frames are due to decoding problems (that they show up in preview suggests they are) so you may well see them again with NVENC encoding.

Your 11700k CPU's iGPU is better for decoding than your NVIDIA card in VEGAS so make sure it's enabled in bios and QSV is selected over NVDEC in preferences file io. The NVIDIA can handle the timeline and NVENC encoding if you like (though QSV is a bit faster).

If you still have black frames after that I'm going to conclude there's a media issue and suggest re-encoding for use in Vegas. Share MediaInfo for more specific advice: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-how-to-post-mediainfo-and-vegas-pro-file-properties--104561/

I enabled the only option I could find in my bios that I thought would turn on the CPU graphics, what ever it was it didn't work, I only see my 3090 in the File I/O preferences page...

Vocoder didn't work, and the solution I said worked last time actually didn't work, I just got lucky and didn't get any black frames that time.

I'm not rendering with 32-bit.

"Can you give screenshots of Options/Preferences/Video and Opt/Pref/File I/O?"
It's literally all default.. I just installed the program and didn't change anything.

putting my ram at 0 didn't work.

However
I'm sitting here now rendering, and I think selecting "Off" in the File I/O preferences menu for both of my 3090 cards (no 3090, just off now), may have worked, or the other thing I tried which is to select "legacy gpu rendering" mode in the Deprecated Features tab in the preferences

@Nathanial-Anderson

I've observed the malfeasance shown in this video in recent weeks, but largely ignored it since I'm mostly working on old finished projects. Adding media to the timeline sometimes leaves a one frame gap on the timeline.

I haven't dug into the phenomenon because:

1. I have other things to do.
2. I figured it would disappear in the next Vegas Pro update.

Update:

Matching Media and choosing new settings to use to start projects appears to have solved the problem for me.

It wouldn't fix any projects saved with the timeline gaps, though.

So, for the last 3 weeks or so, it seemed that turning my ram memory usage or w/e it is down to 0 worked perfectly...

But today the issue has reared it's ugly head again...

It's so frustrating that I paid $300 or w/e I paid for this software and It can't even render a simple video for me, I have to keep going back to Vegas 17 just to get my projects done for my clients.

Anyone know a simple fix?

@john_dennis Thanks for the post, but my problem has nothing to do with gaps between videos on the timeline
It's just one long video, there isn't even any splits, it just adds black frames sporadically at random, I have no idea why. incredibly frustrating though! haha, really makes me wonder how this product can be sold, I feel scammed but, apparently no one else is having this issue.

Edit: I should also mention that in both Vegas 17 and Vegas 20, I now have an issue where the program "Crashes", meaning that the "Vegas Pro has stopped working" box comes up when I try to go render anything, in both programs I can simply ignore it and continue working with the program as if it didn't actually crash, I just move the box to the side.... very weird... and in vegas 17 everything works fine but I'm still getting this black frame issue in vegas 20....

@Nathanial-Anderson Hi, late the party but I've just read this through, I have a 3090 Suprim & i've just done several renders with different render options but still no black frames.. I have an AMD CPU tho not Intel with no integrated graphics so I can't really turn of my GPU,

 I think selecting "Off" in the File I/O preferences menu for both of my 3090 cards (no 3090, just off now), may have worked

I don't know if Vegas can utilise 2 GPU's?

17 & 20 are yrs apart, i'm not sure comparing is actually helpful. ?

In your 3rd comment you said "I've split up all these clips into 10 second of less segments" & above you said "It's just one long video" . Are these different videos & you're 100% sure the black frames are not on the orig media before importing into Vegas?

You've been asked a few times for pics of FileIO settings, you say they're at default, but I don't remember what is default & I'm not going to reset just for this, so pls show those pics 👍

If your orig media is all a similar format or find one that does give you black frames can you share the MediaInfo of that footage, the App is called MediaInfo, download it, it's free & a fast download with no added adverts or any of that rubbish. https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

After downloading, right click on the media file in your Windows folder, open MediaInfo, choose Text from the options at the top, Copy & paste the information in a new comment on here 👍

Like this

& if you want, you could share the file that gives you black frames, put it on Google Drive & everyone on this thread can try it for themselves.
--------------------

PS, post pictures using the arrow button next to the smiley at the top of a new comment 👍

Post pictures of everything - a full screen shot of Vegas, any effects that are added, pictures of the project settings, pictures of Preferences mainly FileIO, Editing & Video, & the media Info i asked for above,

A picture paints a 1000 words & you can't share too much info 👍

I only have one 3090, dno why i wrote that

17 works, 20 doesn't, i'm just complaining I have to go back to the stone age programs to get what i need

I didn't even split up these clips into 10 second things this time

https://i.imgur.com/Wdb252Q.png here's I/O


Hold on, I'll get the file info for the files that give me black frames.

here is one original file (before the black frames) that gives me black frames when I render it through vegas 20




General
Complete name                            : N:\Aeora\Videos\Centaur1Actual0000-6400.mp4
Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                           : Base Media
Codec ID                                 : isom (isom/iso2/avc1/mp41)
File size                                : 2.39 GiB
Duration                                 : 4 min 26 s
Overall bit rate                         : 77.0 Mb/s
Frame rate                               : 24.000 FPS
Recorded date                            : 2023/07/08 21:45:01
Writing application                      : Lavf58.12.100

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High@L5.1
Format settings                          : 4 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC                   : No
Format settings, Reference frames        : 4 frames
Format settings, GOP                     : M=4, N=10
Codec ID                                 : avc1
Codec ID/Info                            : Advanced Video Coding
Duration                                 : 4 min 26 s
Bit rate                                 : 77.0 Mb/s
Width                                    : 3 840 pixels
Height                                   : 2 160 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 24.000 FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.387
Stream size                              : 2.39 GiB (100%)
Writing library                          : x264 core 155
Encoding settings                        : cabac=0 / ref=2 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x3:0x100 / me=hex / subme=6 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.00 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=0 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=-2 / threads=24 / lookahead_threads=4 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=3 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=0 / b_bias=0 / direct=1 / weightb=1 / open_gop=1 / weightp=2 / keyint=10 / keyint_min=6 / scenecut=0 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=10 / rc=crf / mbtree=1 / crf=17.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=10 / qpmax=51 / qpstep=4 / ip_ratio=1.41 / aq=1:1.00
Codec configuration box                  : avcC

Does the Intel iGPU show up in device manager? If so, download a new driver for it and it may appear in VEGAS.

@Nathanial-Anderson Post pics using the arrow button at the top of a new comment, a lot of people don't want to click on a link or simply can't be bothered 👍

This is your pic