You're right in that I'm not the most informed guy out there. Most of the stuff in Vegas I don't understand. I've been doing machine videos for this company sdi.systems for the last 20 years, made a lot of music videos, greenscreened this 5 hour show -eccentroworld.com, lots of weddings, seminars and crap and I barely have any idea what I'm doing. I couldn't explain interlacing or what upper field versus progressive is if my life depended on it. I have only used the Sony MXF mpeg 2 template in Vegas to render video for the last 20 years. That's my master and then I convert it to an mp4 at 20,000 vbr to upload to Youtube or a Dropbox for the client. I'm also a "professional" photographer that gets paid to take tons of headshots and machine photos, and if you offered me a million dollars to tell you what an F-stop or ISO is, I couldn't tell you. I'm going to try tonight, like you say, using AVC and HEVC formats and see what happens.Thanks!

Good luck!

In VP 18 try Apple ProRes as a potential master format and compare to MXF. It's close to an industry standard these days and you can even upload to YouTube with it. (In VP 17 it was "Magix Intermediate.")

For a final render I'd try MagixAVC using a Mainconcept template (unless you are in a hurry or it's a really long project when NVENC, VCE or QSV help speed things up with some quality tradeoffs) and the default bitrate for 1080p is okay.

HEVC is more compressed than AVC so you get smaller file sizes for the same quality but it's somewhat less compatible with playback devices if this is for clients. AVC is more universally supported.

I'll try it. Thanks!

I'm always reluctant to use my Vegas 18 and rarely have ever used it because it usually does something that upsets me. After the first couple of times it crashed on me and I found out all my plug-ins, that I bought bundled with Vegas 14, would not work anymore with the new upgrade, I stopped using it because it was igniting my anger management problem and I was afraid the tumor in my brain might burst. So, I always use my Vegas 14 and 12 to do anything. However, Roger suggested I try rendering to the AppleProRes format in Vegas 18 so I thought I would give it a try. So I import one of the 1000 movs I bought and licensed from Bigstock and Vegas 18 tells me all my files are an unsupported format and won't import the damn video. I open up Vegas 14 and also Vegas 12 and open up the exact movs that Vegas 18 won't import, and they open up perfectly like they have for years. So, I guess now, I'm not understanding how movs I've been using in Vegas 12 and 14 for many years, don't even OPEN in Vegas 18.

For .mov media, go to Options/Preferences/Deprecated Features in Vegas Pro 18 (and 17 for that matter) and check the checkbox for 'Enable the Quick Time plugin'. That should get the .mov media working in Vegas Pro 18. If they don't, it would be useful if you could post a MediaInfo report on an example of that media.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-how-to-post-mediainfo-and-vegas-pro-file-properties--104561/

Works perfectly now. Bless you!

Just out of curiosity, does Vegas 18 run better when a Quicktime codec is disabled? In the olden days with Sony, when you first tried to open an .mov, the program told you needed to download Quicktime and even supplied the link. I'm not a software engineer, but I can think of a lot more important things to improve Vegas than disabling one of the most popular formats. Does it help the program run better in any way if Quicktime files are disabled?

Quicktime became a discontinued product in 2016 I believe and is no longer supported by Apple:

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL837?locale=en_AU

I think that the reason QT became a deprecated feature in Vegas Pro from version 17 was that W10 updates might interact badly with QT so it was better to have it turned off in Vegas Pro so that any incompatibilities between QT and Windows wouldn't affect the broad range of Vegas Pro users, and only those who really need to use QT based media (e.g. mov) can have an option of turning it on.

Quicktime is only needed to decode certain codecs (it is not a codes in and of itself). If you aren't using those video formats it has no impact on the system one way or another as far as I can tell.

A decade ago Vegas was owned by Sony, 32-bit was still common and Quicktime was still being updated on Windows by Apple. None of those things are the case anymore. 32-bit Quicktime is limited in what it can do in Vegas. Too many files and you exceed memory limits and the screen goes black.

Vegas has been migrating more popular formats to other decoders (most notably ProRes to so4compound). I hope that trend continues and the Quicktime decoder can stay in the junk bin where it belongs.

I buy a lot of stock footage from Bigstock.com, Dreamstime, Pond 5 and Storyblocks and that's a lot of the format they sell.

I've used Storyblocks and usually there is a version that Vegas supports directly (I'm not installing Quicktime).

If there are specific formats you need covered, made a note of it in the feature requests thread in the offtopic forum here and maybe it will make it into VP 19!

Ok, this ProRes template is definitely not going to work for me. I made three tests of my Sony MXF template (HD EX 1920x1080-60i Progressive) versus the ProRes templates which are way too big with no discernible difference.

Same length file ProRes422 - 1.1 gigs

ProResHQ - 1.65 gigs

ProResXQ - 13.6 gigs!

Sony MXF - 185mb

Same length file ProRes422 - 407mb

ProResHQ - 609mb

ProResXQ - 5 gigs!

Sony MXF 70mb

Same length file ProRes422 - 543mb

ProResHQ - 812mb

Sony MXF - 90mb

It is my humble contention that the Sony MXF template gives you video that is a hell of a lot smaller and if your eyes can tell any difference between the two different videos, then you must be an android.

Thanks Roger for turning me on to these "MagixAVC using a Mainconcept template" mp4s. I like them. I've tested my old mp4 template versus what you suggested and the MagicAVC renders faster with a smaller file, which is great for me cuz I just uploaded six 4 hour mp4s to JWPlayer and if it takes me half the time to make an mp4 and a smaller file to upload, that's a wonderful thing. If I wasn't a poor neverwas, I'd paypal you $10,000. If a MagicAVC mp4 at 20,000 vbr is going to be my final render, is it a bad idea to just stay in that format and just edit and greenscreen these mp4 files?

I guess what I'm asking is if i should convert whatever footage I'm dealing with to these mp4s and then just try editing them up and adding fx etc...? Do editors just work with mp4s or does the quality of the video suffer?

Still confused as to your workflow.

In general the fewer times you compress a file the better it looks. So if the first time is in camera, if you need a second render, try an uncompressed, or at least relatively low compression, intermediate format. You seem to use Sony MXF so that's fine (though limited to HD). Then the final output is to MagixAVC for delivery.

If the originals require Quicktime to decode in VP 18, then transcoding to an intermediate format makes sense.

If the original file is mp4, there is no reason I can think of to rerender to mp4 and then render again. I work from originals whenever possible.

Sorry, I'm confusing. I do a lot of crap for different people. I work at a stock footage film company mostly digitizing tape and newsreel footage. I work for another company making machine and diagnostic videos. Last week, I set 7 cheap cameras in a warehouse and had to upload seven 4 hour diagnostic mp4s to the web. I do weddings and seminars and stuff like that but mostly I do a lot of green screen. I work with a lot of different photos and stock videos from Bigstock and Dreamstime and composite for a show I have on Youtube. My show is over 5 hours long and every time I add a new skit I have to render and re-render and re-render the show again. I've probably re-rendered the mxf file at least 30 times. My eyes can't see much difference when I render. Usually, I'll take a photo or video and add a lot of different green screen video to it and keep adding stuff till it looks cool to my eye and then I'll put myself in the video doing something crazy. I might render the same mxf file 10 times as I keep adding more things to that clip. My eyes can't see much difference when I render. I thought when you turn off Smart Sample in Vegas and "disable resampling" it's supposed to let you render over and over. If I have like 6 mp4s I've encoded with a high vbr like 20,000 all imported into the Vegas, and then I render the composite into one 20,000 vbr mp4, shouldn't it still look okay?

@thomas-foley This (2016) excerpt below gives a breakdown of Smart Resampling, I no longer have the link, but it looks like something that say Marco might post …

UPDATE: VKMast found it here. Was Nick Hope, not Marco.

”Question .. Back in the old days, if a clip was re-rendered with no new effects and the same codec was used, Vegas would not actually re-render the clip: ie, the rendering process only affected the frames which had changes made to the original which was on the timeline.  Is that the case with all the codecs today?

Answer .. You're referring to "smart-rendering", or "no-recompression" rendering. From the VP14 help (note that AVC is not included):

"Enable no-recompress rendering" - Select this check box if you want to pass through unedited frames without recompression (smart render) for the following formats:

DV AVI

DV MXF

IMX MXF (IMX 24p MXF is not supported for no-recompress rendering)

XAVC Intra MXF

HD MXF

MPEG-2 (for files such as those from HDV and DVD camcorders)

Panasonic P2

XDCAM EX supports smart rendering across the following formats: 

SP 18.3 Mbps CBR 1280x720p to/from XDCAM EX and HDV HD-1

SP 25 Mbps CBR 1440x1080i to/from XDCAM EX, XDCAM HD, and HDV

HD-2HQ 35 Mbps VBR 1440x1080 to/from XDCAM EX and XDCAM HD 

HQ 35 Mbps VBR 1280x720p to/from XDCAM EX

HQ 35 Mbps VBR 1920x1080 to/from XDCAM EX

In order to perform rendering without recompression, the width, height, frame rate, field order, profile, level, and bit rate of the source media, project settings, and rendering template must match. Frames that have effects, compositing, or transitions applied will be rendered."

And heres a similar thread in 2020.

A message appears on screen when no resampling takes place. If that doesn’t appear, and your output file sizes keep getting smaller with each re-encode, (using similar render settings) then your are unlikely to be benefiting from smart resampling.

I've seen that message of no resampling or actually of no recompression required taking place quite a lot.

@JN- you quoted above @NickHope's comment here https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/does-re-rendering-hit-the-quality-of-the-video--104149/#ca643465

@vkmast Thanks. The link I did post above is from a 2020 thread, in your link Nick posted similar content, 2016, quite useful.

The funny thing is, when I posted the link, I didn’t realise that it sort of answered my missing link query😂

But your 2016 link is the correctly referenced link for my long no-recompress post earlier. I will update that post accordingly.

@thomas-foley One good reason to copy the video stream out of the .mxf container to another, like .mov, is that Vegas still does not enable hardware decoding from mxf files. I thought they were going to change that but I just tested it with v18 build 527 and Vegas used my Intel hd630 to decode a test mov clip containing an 8-bit avc video stream. Transferred it to an mxf container using ffmpeg and no hardware decoding when playing it in Vegas. Copied it back (with no re-encode) into another mov container and Vegas uses hardware decoding again.

But take a look at your mxf streams with MediaInfo first. Generally the content has to be 4:2:0 color and avc 8-bit or hevc 8/10-bit for hardware decoding of a copied video stream to be possible without re-encoding. Also, if there are pcm audio streams, best to copy to mov instead of mp4.