Vegas Pro 23 General Stability Question

MarkAnthony121 wrote on 2/14/2026, 3:20 PM

I was planning on doing a fresh windows install since it's been a couple years and things on my system are acting a little weird, plus a new GPU so I figured now was as good a time as ever. However I was debating on also getting VP23 to move up from VP21. I wanted to ask how everyone's general experience was as far as crashes. I'm usually working with footage that Vegas struggles with, 422 HEVC 10bit 4K 60fps. I average around 2-3 crashes per editing workday. Is VP23 any more stable? Even today I'm experiencing issues with waveforms disappearing when I zoom in, songs sounding extremely quiet in my project even though the song is near peaking or all audio going silent until I restart Vegas. Is overall rendering any faster when choosing QSV? And most of all is there any bad input lag? I remember some versions of Vegas being SO snappy moving events and clips around the timeline but some versions it was like walking through quicksand with laggy input. Any experience is appreciated, thanks!

Comments

anthony-chiappette wrote on 2/14/2026, 4:00 PM

You'll get a number of different opinions here. It works fine for some people. It does have issues with certain videos, probably because of the new video engine. I can sometimes edit for several hours with no issues. But lately, I have had to render between 2 and 10 times before it will complete. It will either crash, with the crash report window popping up, or just freeze, with no crash report. It happens at different places in the render process. I haven't had any issues with timeline lag when editing. My main gripe now is rendering. I've had to permanently revert to version 22. I have absolutely no issues with that version.

Read the various VP23 specific complaint threads and you'll see the issues others are having. You can also download the trial version and see if it works for you.

andyrpsmith wrote on 2/14/2026, 4:10 PM

I think @anthony-chiappette has said it all really.

BMR-D wrote on 2/14/2026, 4:24 PM

I upgraded from Vegas Pro 18 to 23, and yes, five versions later, it's more stable with far fewer crashes. But I'm not sure you'll see any major changes from 21 to 23. The team is on the right track, but I think some optimizations are missing. Since I haven't kept up with the updates in recent years, I don't know how things are going. Does the team plan updates, or will they improve and release the new features in the next version? Most of my friends have stayed on version 22/21. Although they liked the new features in VP 23, they prefer the older version.

MarkAnthony121 wrote on 2/14/2026, 4:38 PM

You'll get a number of different opinions here. It works fine for some people. It does have issues with certain videos, probably because of the new video engine. I can sometimes edit for several hours with no issues. But lately, I have had to render between 2 and 10 times before it will complete. It will either crash, with the crash report window popping up, or just freeze, with no crash report. It happens at different places in the render process. I haven't had any issues with timeline lag when editing. My main gripe now is rendering. I've had to permanently revert to version 22. I have absolutely no issues with that version.

Read the various VP23 specific complaint threads and you'll see the issues others are having. You can also download the trial version and see if it works for you.

FYI I'm not sure if your projects have clips on top of one another but this is what caused crashes for me during rendering in case it helps you. For example if I have a wedding ceremony with one 3 cameras and there's multiple layers of video even though perhaps only the top track is needed, it would crash all the time. I would manually add cuts where I wanted angle changes to happed but never cleaned up those underlying clips. Then someone here wrote me a script that cut and deleted any clips that were UNDER other clips but didn't show in playback. Since then my renders are literally 100% crash free.

Reyfox wrote on 2/15/2026, 7:31 AM

One way to find out for sure, using your footage on your computer, is to download the trial version and beat on it for a month before you decide.

anthony-chiappette wrote on 2/15/2026, 1:42 PM

FYI I'm not sure if your projects have clips on top of one another but this is what caused crashes for me during rendering in case it helps you. For example if I have a wedding ceremony with one 3 cameras and there's multiple layers of video even though perhaps only the top track is needed, it would crash all the time. I would manually add cuts where I wanted angle changes to happed but never cleaned up those underlying clips. Then someone here wrote me a script that cut and deleted any clips that were UNDER other clips but didn't show in playback. Since then my renders are literally 100% crash free.

If you mean clips on top of clips on the same event line, no, I don't do that. Most of my videos are one video / audio track, with a single background added on the last track, and about 3 to 6 animated text events at the top, and usually an added supplemental audio track added in (news radio broadcasts). The only fx I use are PIP and usually a brightness / contrast adjustment on the main video. There are also many PNG preview captures mixed in. I also only use the built-in transitions. I have no 3rd party fx packages installed. Due to the type of videos I create, shooting is done where the subject is in horizontal mode, and I flip the video 90 degrees to show the games properly, as a PIP, with the added background and text events. VP22 never balks at his, but VP23 does.

MarkAnthony121 wrote on 2/18/2026, 12:20 AM

FYI I'm not sure if your projects have clips on top of one another but this is what caused crashes for me during rendering in case it helps you. For example if I have a wedding ceremony with one 3 cameras and there's multiple layers of video even though perhaps only the top track is needed, it would crash all the time. I would manually add cuts where I wanted angle changes to happed but never cleaned up those underlying clips. Then someone here wrote me a script that cut and deleted any clips that were UNDER other clips but didn't show in playback. Since then my renders are literally 100% crash free.

If you mean clips on top of clips on the same event line, no, I don't do that. Most of my videos are one video / audio track, with a single background added on the last track, and about 3 to 6 animated text events at the top, and usually an added supplemental audio track added in (news radio broadcasts). The only fx I use are PIP and usually a brightness / contrast adjustment on the main video. There are also many PNG preview captures mixed in. I also only use the built-in transitions. I have no 3rd party fx packages installed. Due to the type of videos I create, shooting is done where the subject is in horizontal mode, and I flip the video 90 degrees to show the games properly, as a PIP, with the added background and text events. VP22 never balks at his, but VP23 does.

Ahh yeah unfortunately that would be a different issue altogether. Hope you or they figure out a way to fix it