Over a year ago, I started a thread https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/tool-for-measuring-render-quality--114398/?page=1 which described a tool, Render Quality Metrics (RQM) for measuring the quality of renders from Vegas. Admittedly, RQM was pretty "clunky" in that it required the user to render an image sequence of BMPs for both the Original and Rendered files. A new version is available in the Happy Otter Free Tools Library which greatly simplifies and speeds up its use. In addition to Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Power Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), RQM now has an option to compute the Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) although it is very slow. RQM now has two apps, a script that renders the image sequence from Vegas and a standalone app that does the computation.
Rather than render two sets of BMPs, RQM makes use of the track compositing mode in Vegas. The rendered file is placed on the top track and its compositing mode is set to "Difference". Another difference is that the BMPs are now directly rendered using the DebugMode FrameServer (DMFS) which speeds up rendering. I've done testing to make sure that BMPs from DMFS are identical to those produced by Vegas. I've also done testing to make sure that the single BMP based on the composite difference in Vegas is the same as the difference from separately rendered BMPs.
There are also options to "speed up" the process by selecting the pixel block size during creation of the BMPs and also an option to select every nth frame during processing. Here are screen grabs of both the script and standalone app.
A demo of its usage can be found at https://vimeo.com/398614859
The new version is titled Vegas Render Quality and can be downloaded at https://tools4vegas.com/library/ The zip file contains both the script and the standalone app.
Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.