I've been using Sony Vegas since about 2013 and Sony Vegas 14 for a long time as well. I decided I would upgrade to Vegas Pro 22. The fact that it can detect and use my RTX 3070 Ti GPU has been a big convenience when rendering videos. However, when I switched over, now when I render my videos, I get strange artifacts on my video and dark banding on the bottom of the video *only* after I render it. On the preview, it looks fine and gorgeous. I've tried many, many different rendering settings, making the quality as high as it can go, but still no difference. And the thing is, that it seems to happen randomly. Sometimes, I will get the strange artifacts (which include a warping effect, almost like the mirage you see when it gets really hot) and the banding. I figured, maybe it's the project settings, and I've changed those to almost every configuration I can think of, but still no difference. I've tried using only 1080p resolution, instead of 4k, but still no effect. I am only using mp4 video files when I edit, so I don't understand if it could be having a compatibility issue. Again, before switching, I never had these issues with rendering - so - I almost feel like I have to go back to my copy of Sony Vegas 14.
Here's a picture of one of the artifacts: https://imgur.com/a/Fd7I4Cs
Other times, the artifacts will mess up the color fidelity for no apparent reason as well, producing black blotches, where there is none in the original video file.