After reading that I am all filled with great Hope, Nick. I know, I just had to say that.

JJK

So, are we going to have it with the next update?

Why filled with any Hope? Vegas has always used the Mainconcpet codecs. Mainconcept really has nothing new. They are very stagnant.

I think the announcement is due to the agreement between SCS and New Concept being replaced by an agreement between Magix and New Concept as part of the transition process we all know about, and NeuLion, the owners of Main Concept, seeing an opportunity for cheap publicity in which they appear to be doing something new.

Quote from Wikipedia:

"MainConcept is a video codec supplier founded in 1993 in Aachen, Germany and a board member of the MPEG Industry Forum. The Russian video codec company Elecard discussed an opportunity to become part of the company between April 2005 and August 2006. In November 2007 MainConcept became a wholly owned subsidiary of DivX, Inc. In June 2010, Sonic Solutions acquired DivX and its subsidiaries in a cash and stock deal valued at $323 million.[1][2] Rovi Corporation acquired Sonic Solutions (including the MainConcept business) in February 2011[3] and later sold off the DivX and MainConcept businesses in April 2014. In February 2015, NeuLion, Inc. acquired DivX, LLC including the MainConcept business."

When a company gets bandied around from pillar to post like this it is not a good sign for its future prospects.

Apparently, NewLion is a primarily a video broadcaster, not a developer, so there is no hope there either. But hope springs eternal...

I looked at the current MainConcept SDK and the only hardware acceleration is provided by using Intel CPUs with Quick Sync, there is nothing available from them for nVidia cards using NVENC. So, move along, nothing to see here.

In Vegas we already have Quicksync support via Sony AVC. For whatever reason Vegas stuffs that function into Sony AVC.

Since Quicksync is a fixed function standalone encoder as is NVENC one can hope that Magix would add NVENC to Sony AVC. Sony AVC is their own native code so they have control. They already have code in the Sony AVC encoder to transfer to an external fixed function encoder like Quicksync so why not NVENC and whatever the AMD equal is.

Using Quicksync is a bitch unless you have the integrated GPU in the CPU chip connected to a monitor. Most of us have Nvidia or AMD GPUs only so supporting their native encoders makes sense and could shut people up about "render" GPU support. An encoder needs to integrate with the muxer and all that and Sony AVC seems to already have that structure defined. All speculation of course.

Nvidia or AMD GPUs support is mandatory today, don't understand why Sony Vegas is not there yet.

Norman, is SonyAVc quicksync in VP14 improved over VP13? I say that because in VP13 Quicksync in SonyAVC is bad done, better than that SonyAVC at all is a messy thing. Firstly other encoding softwares out there can make use of Quicksync without the need of connecting it to monitor so i dont know why in Vegas that is not possible. Second it dont work for footage with higher than 29,97fps in my tests and going even further SonyAVC framerate, resolution and bitrate limitations are a pain in the ass and make QSV useless. It would be nice if they rework SonyAVC and like you said add NVENC and VCE too for NVIDIA and AMD respectively.

But i dont know if in Vegas 14 SonyAVC have some changes in that matter. Apparently Sony add Quicksync in the Sandy Bridge launch and enver worked on it anymore, while in Haswell Intel improved quality and add some features.
 

Using frameserver is possible to make usage of all ASIC encoders with 3rd party encoding softwares but the color changes over Avisynth cause too many hassle and make this work worthless. An full integrated ASIC encoder over Vegas is the best option.

I don't have any way to quickly test Quicksync on my setup since I cannot install the Intel drivers with taking steps to fudge this. It's got nothing to do with Sony AVC. The integrated automatically GPU disables itself if it is not connected to something unless you take various steps. I'm not going to bother installing the Intel GPU drivers and get that going just to do a test. Not interested since I would have to clean the Intel GPU drivers up afterwards. I went through all this before.

The Quicksync interface has not really changed so if newer implementations are better then Sony AVC should take advantage of that. Newer encoding options, in newer implementations, however are likely not going to be available.

Quicksync quality, as all GPU encoders (fixed function or shader based), is just not up to that of other encoders out there. This only really shows (visible) at lower bitrates but that is what I target. When I use Vegas, I frameserve to ffmpeg and use the x264 encoder. Color changes are a non issue. You just have to know what is expected and how things work and work with them. For example, when ffmpeg receives an RGB input it always does a conversion to YUV in a rec601 color space and it assume full range for RGB. I work around that by doing my frameserve RGB to YUV conversion in Avisynth and I control the studio vs full range situation.

Ok, just tested FFmpeg with x264 to find out some answers. Something i noticed is than NVENC and Quicksync cause chroma blurrying but using x264 it dont happen. The interesting than my source files are from OBS with VCE encoding and they have no problem with blurred chroma. So i dont know if FFmpeg has some problem with chroma conversion for NVENC/Quicksync or if it's hardware limitation.

For luminance you're right, i need to apply computer level to my project for frameserver and use yv or yuy2 to get right range level in FFmpeg output.

To frameserve to ffmpeg from Vegas I use this command in AviSynth

ConvertToYUY2(matrix="rec709")

I always pass full range RGB from Vegas to frameserve. The command results in studio levels.

To keep full range I use

ConvertToYUY2(matrix="PC.709")

In Vegas we already have Quicksync support via Sony AVC. For whatever reason Vegas stuffs that function into Sony AVC.

Since Quicksync is a fixed function standalone encoder as is NVENC one can hope that Magix would add NVENC to Sony AVC. Sony AVC is their own native code so they have control. They already have code in the Sony AVC encoder to transfer to an external fixed function encoder like Quicksync so why not NVENC and whatever the AMD equal is.

Using Quicksync is a bitch unless you have the integrated GPU in the CPU chip connected to a monitor. Most of us have Nvidia or AMD GPUs only so supporting their native encoders makes sense and could shut people up about "render" GPU support. An encoder needs to integrate with the muxer and all that and Sony AVC seems to already have that structure defined. All speculation of course.

 

I don't think this is a fair comment "shut people up about "render" GPU support."

Render with gpu support is something worth having, it's a choice then whether to use or not. There are people in both camps, those who will render with and without gpu support. If we don't ask we won't probably ever get it. I accept Norman, from you're comment that it's not something you value, but some others do, myself included.

From everything I've seen, GPU-accelerated renders are of lower quality than renders performed using just the CPU. I'll continue to use the CPU only and the renders will just take as long as they take.

From everything I've seen, GPU-accelerated renders are of lower quality than renders performed using just the CPU. I'll continue to use the CPU only and the renders will just take as long as they take.

That’s exactly how I feel. GPU acceleration is a tradeoff, an engineering compromise. I can see while people would want to use it while editing, but for rendering?

From everything I've seen, GPU-accelerated renders are of lower quality than renders performed using just the CPU. I'll continue to use the CPU only and the renders will just take as long as they take.

For me, this is also the case.  But I can imagine someone (e.g., a youtuber)  who needs very fast turnaround but not ultimate quality, would be happy to compromise to get speed.

People can already use ASIC GPU encoding through frameserver, there is some encoders which has NVENC, Quicksync, VCE support and works with Frameserver.

Testing Mainconcept CPU encoding against x264 shows me than Mainconcept encoding quality is crap. GPU ASIC encoders from all 3 brands has close quality to x264 Veryfast preset but loosing by a bit in older versions like mine Nvenc(Kepler) and Quicksync(Haswell). Used a high motion footage for testing and at low bitrate like 10Mbit/s Mainconcept CPU encoding give worse quality than x264 Veryfast which is much faster than Mainconcept encoding. Thats a bit odd why Mainconcept is slow and yet has that bad quality. I would say than Mainconcept CPU only at that high motion footage with that 10Mbit/s is very close to NVENC quality.

The video project has 44 seconds length, project is build from 3 distinct AVC I420 videos which are splitted on the screen being 1/3 of screen for each video an they're all high motion.

Results:
Mainconcept CPU only VBR 1-pass 10Mbit/s = 189 seconds
Frameserver to FFmpeg:
x264 Slow 10Mbit/s = 175 seconds
x264 veryfast 10Mbit/s = 97 seconds
NVENC H264 10Mbit/s = 87 seconds

On of the likely reasons people have problems with encoding is that these days AVC is often what you want to encoder to and the Mainconcept AVC encoder is just slow. Its has decent quality in two pass mode as shown in AVC encoder comparisons. It generally came in second to x264 and required the least amount of extra bitrate for equal quality to x264.

In Vegas we have the Sony AVC encoder and it is twice as fast as Mainconcept 1 pass AVC. Sony AVC does not have the same quality in some very simple generational tests I once did.

The best encoder out there is x264. It can match the fixed function GPU encoders for speed at a similar quality. It destroys everything else in visual quality, especially at low bitrates, and is still quite fast for that quality delivered.

I have been frameserving to ffmpeg from Vegas for some time to use x264. I only wish apps like Hitfilm could frameserve. With that we are stuck with Mainconcept.