Bob, they are called hardware buffers, and they will be with us forever, sorry to say.

Well, I don't have that problem with my hardware, AMD VCE hevc. My hardware zipping it thru fast, 1080P and 4K, no problem here. The only problem I have right now is that the rendered footage can not be re-import into Vegas. Will freeze when doing so. The thing I don't quite understand is that Vegas can create the file and can not read the file?. Sorry to bring this up on this thread. I have started a thread of it own.

In preferences is it possible to increase the buffer without increasing the pause time and so as example maybe it can render 500frames, pause, 500frames etc, instead of 60frames, pause, 60 ?

This input file also only 3500kbit/s . so really not alot of data moving about.

edit. Interesting to hear Bruce. so maybe I can have pause free rendering

Ok Bruce, your hardware encoder is fast enough to keep up with the pipeline stream. Congratulations.

You have a big tank of water with a spout on the bottom. There are three, and only three possibilities.

1. The hose filling the tank keeps up with the outflow exactly. This, of course, has a statistical probability of zero.

2. The hose doesn't quite keep up. Therefore, the outflow stops and waits periodically, until the fill reaches a certain level, preventing buffer underflow.

3. The hose fills at a faster rate than the outflow. Therefore, the supply is interrupted periodically, preventing buffer overflow.

Either way, the buffer (volume of water, more precisely flow potential) matches the slowest bottleneck in the chain because it has to. Therefore, slowing down the bigger potential output accomplishes ... exactly nothing.

To generalize or mount a predictive model based on one machine with one encoder in it's own unique environment is, of course, ridiculous.

So Bob, your encoder is already running at maximum efficiency, unless you find a way to widen the bottleneck a little; even if the buffer controls were exposed as in x264, the only thing you could physically accomplish is to slow encoding down even further.

I hope a few people are beginning to get the analogy after having repeated it so many times -- the tail doesn't wag the dog, except on Saturday morning teevee.

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Very good analogy, Musicvid! 👍

Quickly encode, quickly fill up the RAM buffer, slowly dump it to the hard drive. Rinse and repeat.