Vegas 18, does anyone max out pc performance with gpu encoding?

RealityStudio wrote on 9/14/2020, 3:00 PM

I know this question has been coming up for over decade now, but I wanted to follow up since we have a new version of Vegas out. Just curious, is anyone able to get Vegas 18 to fully use their pc? I have a 12 core AMD 3900X Ryzen cpu along with an NVidia 1080ti, and from the performance charts I attached my pc is basically snoozing when Vegas 18 renders, it just doesn't use much of it at all. It still *much* faster than without gpu assist (I've timed it) but still, it would be great to know of there is some setting that would let Vegas actually take full advantage of my pc to speed up render times. For reference my videos are very simple, a single 4k file from a Sony A73 camera, a single watermark applied, and a single Film Convert visual effect applied which supports gpu, that's it. Note the gpu graph trails off at the end because the encode had just finished.

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RealityStudio wrote on 9/15/2020, 11:05 PM

Voukoder is highly integrated with VEGAS and can be invoked by batch render script.

It seems to only have a single settings dialog box that applies to all of Voukoder. For example with Vegas default encoders I have multiple settings for various resolutions, bitrates, etc and I can call them all from one script. So if I manually do "Render as" in the dialog that comes up I'll see all my various types of encodes but I usually have my script just call them all automatically as it grinds away. With Voukoder it looks like I could call it from a script, but it would only run with the one settings dialog associated with all of Voukoder. So for example I see Voukoder in the same "Render as" dialog box but I can't see how to setup multiple such options each with different resolutions, bitrates, etc so they can all be called by one script. Or maybe I'm just missing something...

lan-mLMC wrote on 9/15/2020, 11:34 PM

Voukoder's default settings (resolution, frame rate, filed order, progressive scanning, ) are completely the same as VEGAS project so that the final video has as high quality as possible. You can adjust settings in project settings.

If you really want to different presets, you can open Voukoder settings, add a zscale filter and modify it, then save as a Vegas preset in render window.

As for bit rate It is a outdate encode mode. You'd better learn to use CRF mode. And if you really like bit rate mode, you can use ABR mode.

All these custom settings can be save to a Vegas preset in render window.

RealityStudio wrote on 9/16/2020, 2:58 PM

Oh yeah I remember CRF mode when I used to use handbrake so that's cool, I'll look into zscale for resolution, thanks!

RealityStudio wrote on 9/16/2020, 8:43 PM

Ok I got it sorted, you are right you can make multiple configs to where it can be scripted. I rendered another 30 second test in both 4k and 1080p with Vegas and Voukoder presets. I setup the Voukoder presets to make similar file sizes to Vegas presets, time to render is as follows:

1080p result:

Vegas: 14s

Voukoder: 32s

4k result:

Vegas: 36s

Voukoder: 30s

The only reason I think Voukoder is so much slower than Vegas in the 1080p encode test is I think it keeps the source material in 4k in the decode step, then downsamples to 1080p in the encode step whereas it looks like Vegas scripts keep it in 1080p in both steps. I used zscale for the Voukoder 1080p encode in the filter settings but not sure if there is another setting to also force it to decode a 4k source as 1080p in script.

EDIT: Went through the past posts, people mention that Voukoder is locked to the project settings which seems to mean it will be locked into decoding at 4k regardless of the output resolution. Alas that will always make it slower than native Vegas for rendering at anything other than native 4k in my use case since I run one script to process and render everything out which is super convenient for me. I suppose managing multiple scripts would fix it, basically I'd have to have a script per resolution for everything I do but that's not ideal.