Really the answer to your question re stutter-ish is that your GPU is not that great. I also have the Sony AX700 and use as GPU the GTX 1080Ti which is a few years old but if your GPU is 100% the 1080Ti rates as 197% (https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-580.c2938). I have no stutter at best full for playback with simple fades, levels filter, legacy stabilization. It will slow with some intensive GPU accelerated FX such as Neat Video noise reduction.

ProRes works great. Constant framerate short GOP AVC in a mov or mp4 container works fine usually, though 4K60 can challenge some systems.

I use 4K Sony XAVC S and don't have particular problems with it

Without a sample of your video to actually play back on my computer (spec in sig), it's hard to say.

The videos that I were playing back in VP 20 are more personal family videos. Therefore, in order to give a sample project or video, I’d have to find a video recorded with this same video camera that was more general (filming nothing or no one in particular) or film a new video that is just general video, say of outside, for the sole purpose letting anyone test it for me. As I generally don’t like to post personal family videos. I’ll have to see what I can do.

But, I originally had the 1700X and RX 480. Then I went with the 3900X and same graphics card. Adding the RX 6700XT increased rendering 3X. So I would think that it would possibly do the same with timeline playback.

So, you think if you tested one of my videos from my Sony camera that you believe it’d have less problems with stuttering?

Just on a slightly different note, though, if I decide to go ahead and upgrade my AMD-based PC, I was looking at the possibility of going with the Ryzen 7 7700 initially, and then upgrade my PC to, say, with one of the less expensive Radeon RX 7800 XT or RX 7700 XT when they’re released later down the track, because it would be cheaper. or else go with the Intel i5 13600K and RTX 4060 Ti (16GB —when it’s released sometime this month), as it seems that the Intel UHD 770 iGPUs do pretty well at playing back any media in most NLE video editors.

Also, it's dependent on what effects/transitions/etc. are added to your clips. But just playing back for me, a 10bit 422 4K 24P file in Best>Full is no problem.

Well, when I do my family videos series, I will probably mostly be colour grading (i.e. correcting any colour and adjusting shadows and contrast) and probably some upscaling and sharpening of some older videos (i.e. 4:3 720 x 576 videos filmed with an old VHS video camera back in 1993-1995, etc).

This project of mine will be using a wide variety of videos of varying qualities and aspect ratios (4:3 SD 720 x 576, 16:9 SD 720 x 576 — stretched out to 1024 x 576 —, 1280 x 720 HD, 1920 x 1080 FHD, and 3840 x 2160 UHD or 4K). I’m still sorting out and organising the videos. It’s going to be a series and a lot of work. But I don’t mind.

i5 v i7 ... do a Google search re which is better - here's one example: https://www.pcmag.com/news/which-cpu-should-you-buy-intel-core-i5-vs-i7

If you're aiming at video editing, i7 or i9 is the better choice because i5 doesn't have hyperthreading.

My previous computer was a bit older than yours (i7 4070 and an RX 480) but moving up to what I have now (see signature) - even if nearly 3 years ago - was a giant step forward. My FDR-AX100 100 Mbps 4K video plays very well in Vegas Pro 20 at Best but may sometimes be affected by having the CGP window open. I wouldn't expect that there'd be any significant difference between non-FDR AX700 video to AX100 video.

As @andyrpsmith noted, adding FX can affect timeline playback. Some FX such as Neat can reduce the best computer to its knees with regard to timeline playback speed.

i5 v i7 ... do a Google search re which is better - here's one example: https://www.pcmag.com/news/which-cpu-should-you-buy-intel-core-i5-vs-i7

Okay, thanks for the link.

If you're aiming at video editing, i7 or i9 is the better choice because i5 doesn't have hyperthreading.

I checked and the Intel i5 12600K and i5 13600K (as well as some other Intel i5 CPUs) do have hyper-threading, thankfully. I believe that used to be the case with all Intel i5 CPUs before, but these days it’s not the case, especially with Intel’s 12th and 13th gen CPUs. I believe that Intel had to change what they had been doing because of the sudden competition with AMD Ryzen 1000 series CPUs back in 2017, of which was the very year I upgraded to the PC I currently have now. Nevertheless, thanks for the info.

My previous computer was a bit older than yours (i7 4070 and an RX 480) but moving up to what I have now (see signature) - even if nearly 3 years ago - was a giant step forward.

For me, I went from an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU, an NVIDIA GT 430 with 1GB of GDDR3 vRAM, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, 500GB HDD and a generic 300W PSU. I’m not sure if it’s been mentioned on here, but I upgraded that previous HP PC with a 256GB SATA 3 SSD from the HDD and set the SSD as the boot drive and I saw precisely 1 whole minute shaved off, so to speak, my 1 minute and 20 second boot time, where it would then boot up in just 20 seconds, which for me, at the time, was quite a dramatic speed increase. So, as it can be seen for me, this current AMD PC I have was quite a significant leap forward for me in performance also.

My FDR-AX100 100 Mbps 4K video plays very well in Vegas Pro 20 at Best but may sometimes be affected by having the CGP window open.

Yeah, I’m guessing this may be a bug. The dev team just need to get the fly swat to them (😜), which they have been good at doing in the past.

I wouldn't expect that there'd be any significant difference between non-FDR AX700 video to AX100 video.

Neither would I. So, your Sony FDR-AX100 obviously got the firmware update to 100Mbps 4K video like my Sony FDR-AX700 got (it actually came already updated out of the box). Nice!

As @andyrpsmith noted, adding FX can affect timeline playback. Some FX such as Neat can reduce the best computer to its knees with regard to timeline playback speed.

Well, in my case, I initially played back the video with no effects. But when the Colour Grading Panel was open it, even without any correction or FX added, it started to stutter a bit. I don’t know why. That’s why I’m thinking an upgrade is in order as it might help with playback on the timeline as well as rendering.

ProRes works great. If your camera doesn't support it, buy an Atomos Ninja V recorder to mount to it and connect with HDMI. In addition to decoding faster in Vegas, it also is far higher quality than other codecs that are used in your camera.

 

Something I’ve noticed, though, which might be a bug, is when I pull up the Colour Grading Panel the playback becomes even more stutter-like. I don’t understand the reason for that. However, when I set the preview to - Auto - (Best > Auto) it plays my 4K videos @ 960 x 540 (IIRC). I do plan to upgrade my system at some point, but as of right now, I would think that the current specs of my current system should be sufficient in playing back 4K videos at the full resolution with the best quality (see my sig for current PC specifications).

I'd say it depends on how powerful your GPU is, as to how much that bug affects you, opening color grading uses up to twice the amount of GPU power for no reason, so if your GPU is not powerful enough you'll be affected much worse. But also it appears there is some limiting factor that only allows Vegas to draw 100watts, but actually it needs more power. CPU was not high, and that causes the frame drop.

Also an interesting thing is those GPU power spikes when not in color grading mode. It's quite possible those correlate to when Vegas will go from playing fine to lagging, to playing fine again, and this will also affect people with lower powered GPU's the most.

I find ProRes from a NinjaV works pretty well for editing, but it wastes allot of media space in-camera and throughout editing and archiving. It's a bit too unwieldy for the 3 to 5 hour continuous shoots I often do. And coming off of hdmi creates reliability issues; if any problems develop with the cable or connection it will lead to glitches. I get the best results shooting hevc 4:2:0 to 2tb m.2 media via a cfast adapter. As mentioned above, hevc does require strong hevc decoding support but adding an Intel Arc a380 as a 2nd gpu is pretty economical if you have a free video slot & pcie lanes. With the 4k 4:2:0 hevc I shoot, even the smallest Nvidia 1660 I use as a 2nd gpu for decoding in my old xeon performs well enough that I haven't bothered to swap it out for an Arc as I did in 2 other faster desktops. I do love using the NinjaV as a monitor for my zcam, however... excellent scopes and zcam camera control.

Another potential format I'd consider if ever gets Vegas support it is Braw v2 captured by the Video Assist 12G which is conceptually similar to a NinjaV. I've tested 4-camera multicam with v1 Braw, which Vegas does support, and the results are very encouraging. A little bit more compact than ProRes Raw and playback performance on the latest vp20 release is quite good. Zcam supports 12G v2 braw it but my xf605 doesn't yet. I'd guess that 2/3 of the zcam user base on their huge facebook forum are Resolve users whose 2nd camera is a Black Magic. And they seem to like the 12G. If Vegas supported it I'd grab one for my zcam and move the NinjaV over to my Canon for monitoring. If I was more skilled with Resolve, I wouldn't wait.

ProRes 422 is definitely bigger, but a 1TB SSD drive in the Atomos Ninja V will hold a 3 hour shoot (I happen to be editing one right now) easily, and you can edit the files directly off of that drive, so what I do is just that, I plug the drive in via USB, edit right off the drive into VEGAS, then render that out from there. I also record a backup H264 or HEVC file simultaneously onto an SD card in the camera itself, and if I need to archive, that is the file I archive with, which saves a lot of HDD space for archival. This gives me the security of not having to worry about HDMI issues, I have a backup recording, but I still get the performance and quality benefit of ProRes, and also have an archive file on the SD card that isn't ridiculously huge.

i5s do have hyperthreading and more importantly perform excellently in VEGAS. (think the limitation was pre 10th gen). See my signature for two benchmarks and times with my i5-13600K which has 14 cores and 20 threads.

i7 and i9 come with more significant power and cooling needs and a higher price I didn't find was justified for what I do.

One thing to keep in mind with a ProRes work-flow is that larger media sizes will push you into wanting larger capacity and more ssds and hard drives as well as more memory. Which will compromise performance and disable slots and devices on common motherboards as pcie lanes get used up. Also keep in mind that nvme-ssds sharply drop in performance as they near their capacity limit and that both sata- and nvme-ssds slow down for capacities larger than 2tb. And that 4-dimm, 2-channel memory drops in performance as stick size increases. These constraints make more expensive workstation/server motherboards and cpus with more of everything a better performing editing platform for dealing with large-media.

ProRes is great for 10 bit intermediates. But there is the inherent issue of shadow noise with 8 bit source and output, not to mention the size/time overkill.

I wonder what people are using for 8 bit intermediate or editing formats? Currently I use XDCAM-EX for FHD and XAVC for 4k.