Good news! Thanks!

Great comparison, thanks.

Thanks for sharing, frosty. This is good to see!

Slightly unrelated but you are using 10 bit video clips in an 8 bit project? Does that still yield benefits in precision when say color correcting log footage or do you have to be in 32 bit mode to benefit from that?

One camera was recording in 10 bit (the GH5). As for if it yields any improvement, I'd imagine it would, since the data is there to work with, but we'd have to get one of the developers or more knowledgeable users to chime in on that one (Musicvid?), I imagine you can still use all the data, but it must be squeezed into an 8 bit, 256 level per primary range in the project. As such, I've always recorded 10 bit when I can. I record in 10 bit exclusively now with all of my cameras (I got rid of the GH4s, and will never use a gopro again, as the quality was horrible).

That said, Musicvid did discover a defect with using 10 bit in 8 bit projects, it creates banding in the shadows, but he also posted a workaround to fix it, with a simple level adjustment.

Using hardware encoding is good, as it's speed should not change between vp17 and vp18 , it should be a constant and I don't know much about VCE encoding, but as long as it's capable of a higher speed then the fastest speed you encoded at it should be good for the benchmark. It appears therefore that the improvement must come down to rendering, and VP18 can throw frames at the hardware encoder at a much higher speed. Does seem positive.

The team put a lot of work into the video playback engine, and it's really showing. The project load times are a welcome treat as well. I remember a point where it would take VEGAS 17 as much as 20 minutes to open that same project (they dramatically improved that with updates, but 18 took it even farther).

Some of you who have been worried about GPU and CPU utilization will be glad to see this... this is a snap taking of my task manager during render of that same project, same settings.

Ryzen 7 1800x 8 core 16 thread CPU, Radeon VII GPU

👍👍👍 Can't wait to try it myself! Thanks!

I noticed a vast improvement in load time as well. On a 3 hours+ 4K (no proxies) project with lots of VFX on a 6 years old Dell i7 desktop, the load time on VP17 was 3' 40" whereas opening the same project in VP18 was 1' 45" - just a fracca better than 50% faster.

Thanks for sharing, frosty. This is good to see!

Slightly unrelated but you are using 10 bit video clips in an 8 bit project? Does that still yield benefits in precision when say color correcting log footage or do you have to be in 32 bit mode to benefit from that?

@RogerS  I don't think that a 10 bit footage would yield any benefit in an 8 bit project, otherwise what's the use of 10 bit projects? However, I am not 100% sure!

Thanks for sharing, frosty. This is good to see!

Slightly unrelated but you are using 10 bit video clips in an 8 bit project? Does that still yield benefits in precision when say color correcting log footage or do you have to be in 32 bit mode to benefit from that?

@RogerS  I don't think that a 10 bit footage would yield any benefit in an 8 bit project, otherwise what's the use of 10 bit projects? However, I am not 100% sure!

The use of 32 bit projects (which enable 10 bit) would be exporting to 10 bit or HDR formats.

Thanks for sharing, frosty. This is good to see!

Slightly unrelated but you are using 10 bit video clips in an 8 bit project? Does that still yield benefits in precision when say color correcting log footage or do you have to be in 32 bit mode to benefit from that?

@RogerS  I don't think that a 10 bit footage would yield any benefit in an 8 bit project, otherwise what's the use of 10 bit projects? However, I am not 100% sure!

The use of 32 bit projects (which enable 10 bit) would be exporting to 10 bit or HDR formats.

@fr0sty "The use of 32 bit projects (which enable 10 bit) would be exporting to 10 bit or HDR formats" That is true but also I do not believe that using 10 bit footage on 8 bit project will yield any benefit because the output will always be 8 bit.