Does XAVC-I support Alpha Channel? That's the biggest reason I still use Cineform as I receive at times premade motion graphics with an Alpha Channel (Typically image sequences wrapped in a MOV container). I'm more than willing to convert to using XAVC-I since I do have Catalyst to convert clips to.

I am not sure if XAVC-I does support alpha channel but it does support 10bit and it is decoded as 10bit in Vegas.

I am not sure if XAVC-I does support alpha channel but it does support 10bit and it is decoded as 10bit in Vegas.

It seems XAVC-I doesn't support Alpha channel - is Cineform decoded as 10 bit in Vegas?

Both Cineform but also XAVC-I are decoded in Vegas as 10bit if you use a 32bit floating point project. For footage like XAVC-I QSV will add less value compared to long-GOP footage. So for this type of footage a 8 or 10 or 12 core Intel System will be the best choice today. Vegas is not so well optimized for AMD CPUs, so processors like the Rycen may not perform as well as Intel CPUs. But be aware that the performance of codecs like Cineform or XAVC-I will still need some improvement in Vegas, especially for 4K.

The reworked LUT plugin utilizes my NVIDIA Quadro in a nice way, and tends to outperform all other LUT plugins that I have tested (Hitfilm, Looks4, Visioncolor). I have beside the Quadro also an AMD R9 390X in my system (with 8GB to support also Resolve). However, the combination of this two GPUs is not optimal, to mix NVIDIA with AMD has never been the best idea. But the R9 390X is still a great support for the real-time playback performance.

@Wolfgang S. - My biggest concern is RT playback performance of the timeline - I render 99.9% of the time to mp4 using the Vegas2Handbrake script. I'm hesitant to move away from Intel - even older CPU's given they seem to just work. I'm more conservative in my hardware choices - hence why I'm still editing on an x58 desktop - it just works but as I'm not editing 4K yet, not sure what that bodes for me later this year when I upgrade to cameras that can shoot 4K footage. Are you referring the Vegas Pro 15 LUT feature? I'm willing to deal with a hexcore processor for the time being and utilize proxies if needed when editing 4K.

Regarding the AMD R9 RX390 - how well does it perform in Vegas Pro 15? Or do you find the nVidia card works better for RT playback? I'm trying to decide what to do for upgrading my aging desktop but it still works well - at least for editing 1080p footage.

Personally I'd stay far away from using Vegas and AMD cards. I have an RX480 with 8 GB ram on an ASUS with i7 and 64gb RAM and have had nothing but problems especially since upgrading to Windows 10 (both Vegas 13 and Vegas 15). I use a dual monitor setup and Vegas constantly gets confused which monitor is the main one, flashes to black during many edit tasks when using secondary preview mode (this problem started in windows 10) and crashes 95% of the time when I click "render as". I can edit and render all day long in Premiere, After Effects, Resolve, Tmpegenc etc. but Vegas can't even render my projects most of the time. As soon as Resolve works better with still images and timeline navigation I plan on leaving Vegas in the grave as I think it's built on old code that will never be updated properly. Compared to Resolve the playback, rendering and program updates are slow as molasses and so far every Resolve update has been free.

Personally I'd stay far away from using Vegas and AMD cards. I have an RX480 with 8 GB ram on an ASUS with i7 and 64gb RAM and have had nothing but problems especially since upgrading to Windows 10 (both Vegas 13 and Vegas 15). I use a dual monitor setup and Vegas constantly gets confused which monitor is the main one, flashes to black during many edit tasks when using secondary preview mode (this problem started in windows 10) and crashes 95% of the time when I click "render as". I can edit and render all day long in Premiere, After Effects, Resolve, Tmpegenc etc. but Vegas can't even render my projects most of the time. As soon as Resolve works better with still images and timeline navigation I plan on leaving Vegas in the grave as I think it's built on old code that will never be updated properly. Compared to Resolve the playback, rendering and program updates are slow as molasses and so far every Resolve update has been free.

TBH, I see your point and is why I've stuck with Premiere Pro CS6 for so long - it's been rock solid save for the pretty annoying bug that has yet to be corrected in even the current version of PPro. I'm still investigating the full transition but TBH, I know Premiere almost like the back of my hand. And given that CS6 is ONLY nVidia, I need to look at how to utilize more current cards - and I'm looking into that even more given my experiences with the AMD Radeon card that turned into a heater in my desktop computer. I'm also looking at Resolve 15 but it feels foreign to me for color grading - I'll slowly test once it comes out of beta...

"I'm also looking at Resolve 15 but it feels foreign to me for color grading - I'll slowly test once it comes out of beta..."

The more I use resolve the more I'm amazed at the color correction abilities but it definitely takes some time to get used to the superior workflow. Now that they've added Fusion & Fairlight to the program I think it will be amazing once they work out the kinks. The new feature manual for Resolve 15 is nearly 300 pages long! That said I still like Vegas for certain projects (been using it since version 3) but the secondary preview and render issues are driving me crazy.

"I'm also looking at Resolve 15 but it feels foreign to me for color grading - I'll slowly test once it comes out of beta..."

The more I use resolve the more I'm amazed at the color correction abilities but it definitely takes some time to get used to the superior workflow. Now that they've added Fusion & Fairlight to the program I think it will be amazing once they work out the kinks. The new feature manual for Resolve 15 is nearly 300 pages long! That said I still like Vegas for certain projects (been using it since version 3) but the secondary preview and render issues are driving me crazy.

And given there's no recommended hardware configuration like you get with Adobe, Resolve and Avid, it's a crap shoot in getting Vegas to work as well as those apps.

I've tried them all on my system. Premiere pulls P2 footage in really nicely, but the waveforms on the audio tracks are so low res they are somewhat useless for sync of multiple cameras. I really wanted to like Vegas, but I can't get hardly anything to render without crashing, which sucked because I nearly got to the end of my project before discovering the rendering issue. I've switched to resolve and found for what I do, I do not need any of the 3rd party plugins I got used to using on vegas. I am just grateful for everyone buying BMD hardware that I can't afford to make my software investment so cheap. Anyway to the original point, I recently upgraded my FX 8350 24GB of RAM which did work with vegas under win 7 quite well, to a TR 1950X with 32GB of RAM only to discover Vegas still crashed under Win 10. Resolve doesn't play well with P2, but once I figured out how to manually set that up, I discovered SFP 12 does an excellent job pulling in P2 Audio it even pulls the video with it. Making it extremely easy to convert to wav for use in Resolve. Not that resolve won't manually pull in P2 audio seperately. I just had to fix some terrible clipping at the same time and the Resolve/Fairlight didn't work with the izotope mastering declipper probably because my version of izotope came with Sound Forge Pro 11.

Oh, and on my system easily identifiable smart renders in Resolve 14/15 Studio fly along at around 130 frames per second. That's with color grading applied. I haven't tried one with de noise yet. Preview window runs at 5.5 frames per second, so I am expecting at least that, which is about the same as I got with Neat enabled in VP15...until it crashed :)

I discovered while resolve does decode flac now, it doesn't do it so well....yet. I anticipate that to be fixed by GA.

@wireless112 - I'm dealing with an issue of my audio being out of sync on renders from VP14!!! urgh! 😡

I'm in the middle of a project and the client is noticing that the audio is about 2 frames out of sync with the audio - yet it plays back in sync on the timeline. I've been exporting out the project as premiere pro projects and have been editing that way all evening. TBH, I'm just about fed up with it - Vegas is really only good for creating audio slideshows anymore IMO. I've lost time and money because of this - I'm not happy yet again with Vegas - like you I want to like it - in theory I love the paradigm. In reality, it's dying a slow ugly death IMO. Back to Premiere Pro for now and to learn Resolve as I have a sneaking suspicion that it will do what Vegas can do - and more, while being reliably stable.

Cliff, Resolve 14 is not perfect but I've edited various short videos with zero crashing just finished 9 conference lectures with slides and it was a joy. Was able to able to play back XAVC-L 4k re-framed footage on a 1080p timeline with color correction and temporal noise reduction in real time on my 42" plasma using the BM output card. Renders were mind boggling fast with zero issues. (Note: spacial noise reduction is not real time).

What I do miss about Vegas is the fluidity of the timeline movement using the mouse and modifier keys (no other program manufacturer seem to understand this brilliance), and keyframing movement on photos etc (Resolve needs work in this area but hopefully Fusion integration will solve this). Also you can't right click on an audio file and choose "open copy in audio editor". You have to export the track then re-import. Once they get the additional native Fairlight plugins worked out in Resolve 15 though I suspect being able to stay inside the program most of the time. Also the "deliver" page is awesome and has some excellent batch functionality. Media sorting is great too and did I mention the color correction abilities... ;) By the way I'm using the paid "studio" version which is supposed to have better playback performance.

@wireless112 - I'm dealing with an issue of my audio being out of sync on renders from VP14!!! urgh! 😡

I'm in the middle of a project and the client is noticing that the audio is about 2 frames out of sync with the audio - yet it plays back in sync on the timeline. I've been exporting out the project as premiere pro projects and have been editing that way all evening. TBH, I'm just about fed up with it - Vegas is really only good for creating audio slideshows anymore IMO. I've lost time and money because of this - I'm not happy yet again with Vegas - like you I want to like it - in theory I love the paradigm. In reality, it's dying a slow ugly death IMO. Back to Premiere Pro for now and to learn Resolve as I have a sneaking suspicion that it will do what Vegas can do - and more, while being reliably stable.

Cliff, just because you still cannot make Vegas work correctly on your old hardware and with your formats does not mean is it is "really only good for creating audio slideshows anymore". Like other NLEs, Vegas has issues, but they can be worked around. Many users continue to get along fine with Vegas and do top-level professional work with it. If you have an issue like audio being out of sync, then troubleshoot it methodically and find a successful workflow! Good luck with Resolve. I hope it works out for you. I guess you will still need new hardware for it to do what you want, or even work.

@Wolfgang S. - My biggest concern is RT playback performance of the timeline - I render 99.9% of the time to mp4 using the Vegas2Handbrake script. I'm hesitant to move away from Intel - even older CPU's given they seem to just work. I'm more conservative in my hardware choices - hence why I'm still editing on an x58 desktop - it just works but as I'm not editing 4K yet, not sure what that bodes for me later this year when I upgrade to cameras that can shoot 4K footage. Are you referring the Vegas Pro 15 LUT feature? I'm willing to deal with a hexcore processor for the time being and utilize proxies if needed when editing 4K.

Regarding the AMD R9 RX390 - how well does it perform in Vegas Pro 15? Or do you find the nVidia card works better for RT playback? I'm trying to decide what to do for upgrading my aging desktop but it still works well - at least for editing 1080p footage.

Yes, I refer to the new LUT plugin in V15 b321 - only this has GPU support.

The R9 360X 8GB performs great in Vegas, even if it is an older card by now. I think that it is fine to go for that or a newer AMD card.

I shoot UHD now with my third camera - GH4 with Shogun 1, FS7 and now with the EVA1. 4K - especially if it is i-frame only and if it is UHD 50p/60p - is still a problem in Vegas. If you go for that then the numbers of cores are important - so here I would go for a 10 or 12core intel System since QSV does not add a lot of value for all-I footage like XAVC-I or Cineform

If you will edit long-GOP then QSV is a nice way to go, but here I would take the 6 core version.

Since the GHz are important for Vegas, do not choose GPUs with a low GHz figure. Sometimes overclocking helps in Vegas, but the a watercooling System makes sense.

Today it may still happen that for some type of 4K footage you have to reduce the preview quality and find the optimal allocation to the dynamic ram. They still work on that to improve playback performance, but that is no short term activity.

Personally I'd stay far away from using Vegas and AMD cards. I have an RX480 with 8 GB ram on an ASUS with i7 and 64gb RAM and have had nothing but problems especially since upgrading to Windows 10 (both Vegas 13 and Vegas 15). I use a dual monitor setup and Vegas constantly gets confused which monitor is the main one, flashes to black during many edit tasks when using secondary preview mode (this problem started in windows 10) and crashes 95% of the time when I click "render as". I can edit and render all day long in Premiere, After Effects, Resolve, Tmpegenc etc. but Vegas can't even render my projects most of the time. As soon as Resolve works better with still images and timeline navigation I plan on leaving Vegas in the grave as I think it's built on old code that will never be updated properly. Compared to Resolve the playback, rendering and program updates are slow as molasses and so far every Resolve update has been free.

I see similar issues here, but my impressionn is that this is the combination of AMD-GPU and NVIDIA-GPU here. The funny point is that it seems to be more a driver issue to. That happens here that I have to restart the system after short time - but then Vegas is stable in most cases for the rest of the day. Crazzy

What I do not see here is the general render issue that you describe.

Sure Resolve is great especially for raw footage as CDNG. But for the other codecs including also ProRes (not raw) Vegas is still fine too here.

@wireless112 - I'm dealing with an issue of my audio being out of sync on renders from VP14!!! urgh! 😡

I'm in the middle of a project and the client is noticing that the audio is about 2 frames out of sync with the audio - yet it plays back in sync on the timeline. I've been exporting out the project as premiere pro projects and have been editing that way all evening. TBH, I'm just about fed up with it - Vegas is really only good for creating audio slideshows anymore IMO. I've lost time and money because of this - I'm not happy yet again with Vegas - like you I want to like it - in theory I love the paradigm. In reality, it's dying a slow ugly death IMO. Back to Premiere Pro for now and to learn Resolve as I have a sneaking suspicion that it will do what Vegas can do - and more, while being reliably stable.

Cliff, just because you still cannot make Vegas work correctly on your old hardware and with your formats does not mean is it is "really only good for creating audio slideshows anymore". Like other NLEs, Vegas has issues, but they can be worked around. Many users continue to get along fine with Vegas and do top-level professional work with it. If you have an issue like audio being out of sync, then troubleshoot it methodically and find a successful workflow! Good luck with Resolve. I hope it works out for you. I guess you will still need new hardware for it to do what you want, or even work.

I still say hardware is the main cause for problems with Vegas and many users just don’t want to accept it. I have been running SVP11 with GPU acceleration the day it came out without issues and all other versions thereafter aside from VP15. Maybe it’s also that I don’t feed Vegas with formats that are more “out there” but stick do what is proven to work, HDV, AVCHD and now XAVC-S and I.

Many that build new systems in the past few years have gone out and bought the latest latest, especially GPUs only do find out it doesn’t work well. Others have gone for Xeon CPU only to find out is doesn’t work as well as fast desktop CPU. We have gone through the hardware setups numerous times in this forum but many went their own ways anyway. I have given up on advising anyone any further. It’s a bit like children that have to make mistakes in order to actually learn something. It is however unfortunate that Sony and now Magix doesn’t make more specific suggestion at all with regards to hardware. Yes, Vegas may be a bit more sensitive to hardware but my systems isn’t anything special at all and even after almost 5 years can still keep up and edit 4K satisfactory without proxies.

+1 OldSmoke

+2 Oldsmoke. No problems here on all of my custom built computer. My first one were 3930k at 5ghz 6 cores and my 2nd built were 4930k at 4.5ghz and latest build is TR 1950X at 4ghz and is absolutely awesome. I have no problem with VP13, 14,15. My footages are Gh5 5d3 and samsung NX500 h265 codec.

I apologize for venting last night - I had spent too many hours editing yesterday and stayed up til close to 1am editing when the client stated the out of sync issues, I just sorta snapped. It could be client specific device/machine that's causing the problem for all I know. I don't see the out of sync of video audio issue locally in the rendered mp4 file or on the timeline.

Here's the link to the video I'm still working on - I post to a private vimeo link for client review and I'm not sure myself if I'm seeing the sync issue - anyone?

https://vimeo.com/265309573/f109558f25

Is it me or is the video oh so slightly out of sync as the client said? I'd much rather stay in Vegas than deal with Premiere Pro - but if Vegas is the issue - I'll finish my work in Premiere Pro. If it's an internet issue - I'll smile and keep using Vegas Pro. I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't more of an issue with using the Vegas2Handbrake script for rendering out web deliverables as I reviewed some other videos I've done using that script and I do think there is a very slight sync issue. I'm going to render the same video listed in this response not using the script and see if I experience the same issues.

Need some other eyeballs on this to get a fresh perspective.

@wireless112 - I'm dealing with an issue of my audio being out of sync on renders from VP14!!! urgh! 😡

I'm in the middle of a project and the client is noticing that the audio is about 2 frames out of sync with the audio - yet it plays back in sync on the timeline. I've been exporting out the project as premiere pro projects and have been editing that way all evening. TBH, I'm just about fed up with it - Vegas is really only good for creating audio slideshows anymore IMO. I've lost time and money because of this - I'm not happy yet again with Vegas - like you I want to like it - in theory I love the paradigm. In reality, it's dying a slow ugly death IMO. Back to Premiere Pro for now and to learn Resolve as I have a sneaking suspicion that it will do what Vegas can do - and more, while being reliably stable.

Cliff, just because you still cannot make Vegas work correctly on your old hardware and with your formats does not mean is it is "really only good for creating audio slideshows anymore". Like other NLEs, Vegas has issues, but they can be worked around. Many users continue to get along fine with Vegas and do top-level professional work with it. If you have an issue like audio being out of sync, then troubleshoot it methodically and find a successful workflow! Good luck with Resolve. I hope it works out for you. I guess you will still need new hardware for it to do what you want, or even work.

I still say hardware is the main cause for problems with Vegas and many users just don’t want to accept it. I have been running SVP11 with GPU acceleration the day it came out without issues and all other versions thereafter aside from VP15. Maybe it’s also that I don’t feed Vegas with formats that are more “out there” but stick do what is proven to work, HDV, AVCHD and now XAVC-S and I.

Many that build new systems in the past few years have gone out and bought the latest latest, especially GPUs only do find out it doesn’t work well. Others have gone for Xeon CPU only to find out is doesn’t work as well as fast desktop CPU. We have gone through the hardware setups numerous times in this forum but many went their own ways anyway. I have given up on advising anyone any further. It’s a bit like children that have to make mistakes in order to actually learn something. It is however unfortunate that Sony and now Magix doesn’t make more specific suggestion at all with regards to hardware. Yes, Vegas may be a bit more sensitive to hardware but my systems isn’t anything special at all and even after almost 5 years can still keep up and edit 4K satisfactory without proxies.

The search feature is semi useless - I'd like to see a pinned section that discusses nothing but hardware that can easily be studied - @NickHope?

I'm in the process of determining a new build - I've been out of the loop long enough now in building that I have no clue what to spec out for parts. I have three large projects I'm in the middle of and they payoff will be nice so I'm budgeting new computer build but want to keep things within reason.

My guess is to avoid Ryzen and stick with Intel for the CPU? I'm guessing ASUS for motherboard and at least 32GB RAM? AMD GPU? Confused is an understatement as the new build info I've been searching for is about computer builds for Premiere Pro and Resolve.

Let me emphasize again - I do love Vegas in theory - if it's my current computer build causing the issues than I need to update my hardware for sure.

I see no sync issues with the Vimeo video. I spot checked the several talking heads. If you stare at the lips, you can start making it out of sync mentally. This is probably a case of once the client sees an error, they start imagining more errors. But the sync looks fine to me.

I watched the Vimeo video with wired headphones on my iPad and probably wouldn’t have complained about audio sync. When primed to look for it, I’d say the audio is right on or leading the mouth movement. I’d probably slip the audio one or two frames (later) and call it a day. People are more tolerant of hearing the audio a little after the action because that’s what happens in nature.