Last year I started to look at moving from H264 to a more modern Codec to reduce file size and archive my home video.

My Camcorders since 2015 are Sony AX100 and AX700 plus some Iphone SE 4k, I choose to shoot in 4K XAVC 100Mb/s, a codec which Vegas likes and I started with Vegas V13 and have bought all the versions to V22. Without doubt the most impressive version I have used is the current V22, credit to Magix staff for producing the most stable version yet, no crashes at all (excepting the legacy stabilizer which I use always as my first stabilization option. I know it will crash about 1 in 10 clips but it produces such a nice image taking out any rotation with ease. Please please Magix keep it available as a legacy option.)

I have been using H264-NVENC via Voukoder-free edition for a number of years at bit rates VBR of 93/186 which produces 500Mb/min of video at fantastic quality. I tried H265 but did not really see much improvement over H264, in fact I noticed some shimmering to fine detail on grass and bushes so I stayed with H264. But last year I started to look for alternatives. I tried AV1-NVENC via the free Voukoder and had some excellent discussion with Howard on this forum, many thanks Howard. Howard ran some Metrics with AV1 and various bit rates which confirmed my choice of AV1 as a good one.

Over the last few weeks I have made a few projects and to my disappointment I found that the free Voukoder is no more, replaced by Voukoder Pro with an annual licence of £60 or so. I looked into it but it is far more complex than the free version so I have looked to see if an alternative is available. I tried Magix software AV1 last year and found it ran at about 5-10fps (13900K CPU) as opposed to AV1-NVENC at 80fps and produced some minor artefacts in my video especially in rendering sand on a beach.

Over the last few days I settled on AV1 at bit rates of 40 VBR producing a file size of 50% the H264 at overall bit rate of 79Mb/s with fantastic quality. So what will I use to replace Voukoder.

I own Happy Otter Scrips so I looked at HO Render+ and initially did not see any option for the AV1-NVENC codec (I have a 4090 NVidia card which can encode AV1). However buried away in the codec options page of HO is a tiny blue option which scanned my PC and found the option of AV1 SRT (CPU) and NVENC (GPU). Well done Wayne you saved the day. I created templates (I wish they could be merged into Vegas render options, let us know if they can) and ran VBR at 40/80, fantastic perfect.

I highly recommend the purchase of HO Scripts for Vegas they provide so much flexibility. So my journey ends to AV1 via Happy Otter. Thanks to Magix and everyone on this forum who help Vegas to move forward as a better NLE.