@fr0sty Yeah so does mine & my GoPro 11 does. So..?

You edited your comment,-

Yeah I was hoping or sort of assumed that was the reason for trying a harder format to work with, I appreciate the clarification there 👍

As for stability, I haven't had a mid-editing crash throughout the entire testing process of this update. I had one crash to report, which was when I switched from 32 bit mode back to 8 bit when testing performance, the preview monitor froze and stopped playing back video, but all other functions in VEGAS were still working (so I could have saved my project if I needed to)... and that was 1-2 builds ago, that may have been patched out by now, I haven't noticed it since.

@fr0sty If you get chance can you ask about Boris's Silhouette with regs to the new Vegas version, Silhouette was supported by Vegas but not anymore, I have the Standalone+Plugin version, I mainly open the Standalone but discovered this 'not supported anymore' when I opened the plugin & it crashed every time when returning to Vegas.

I got no more than this from Boris.

If anyone doubts what Smart Mask 2 can do, take a look at this. Apart from mask failure when the plane is part way off the screen at the start and end, it's fairly decent.

Definitely a good starting point, with some mask feathering and refinement, it could be very solid.

Here's the result on a dancing girl, as originally advertised. I do get some glitching on the first 5 frames when rendering, the mask is out of place, but it corrects after frame 5 and is good to go from there. I'll post the final result when it finishes rendering.

Here's the final result. The first 5 frames are messed up, and there's a little bit of video to the right of her that didn't get properly masked out, I could easily clean that up by refining the smart mask or just masking those areas to her right out in post, but it got the job done a hell of a lot faster than I could have manually. Note I also didn't feather the mask at all, so I could have made the edges even smoother:

Original:

Smart Mask 2.0

My only gripe at this point is the render time is excessive, it took 12 minutes to render that 8 second clip on my desktop (see signature)... but I would have easily spent that time manually masking her out... if you look at the video in my post above, you can see the process of applying and motion tracking the mask was actually pretty fast.

@Former user Dd you delete your response to my comment containing the plane mask? I got a notification email but now I can't fine it in the post. Anyway, you said that "That doesn't reassure any doubt whatsoever, that's one constant image on a regular 2 ...". Ok, so take a look at this.

 Original

Masked

Am I free to say that in the new release (discussed in this topic) also the audio features have made a big improvement?

Speed, stability, VST3 support (compatibility), etc... are all impressive better.

@Jack S Hi, yes I mistook your video, I thought that it was just a plane moving on a B/W background, no wonder it was easy to track & I asked you to try it on a person in the street with rotation, shear & parallax etc. but then it dawned on my that was the masked plane after Smart mask - bezier mask applied over the media generated chequer board & I realised you were talking about Smart Mask 2 🤦‍♂️ @fr0sty also had replied while i was typing with the dancing woman, so i deleted it. Doh, I was busy & didn't read or watch it properly, sorry,

@fr0sty

if you look at the video in my post above, you can see the process of applying and motion tracking the mask was actually pretty fast.

This is what your video looks like on my 32"UHD screen, it's hard to see what's going on.

-

That flag does look good & the post could be easily fixed 👍

Yeah, I have an ultrawide monitor, so it doesn't fill a 16:9 screen.

Petersson, yes, NDA has been lifted, feel free to talk about the update.

In a nutshell, I added the effect, used the square selection tool to draw a rectangle around the girl dancing, making sure to leave some space to her left and right in order to fit her arms in as she swings them around. From there, because my playback cursor was in the middle of the video at the time, I selected "track backwards" to motion track her back to the beginning, and then "track forward" to go from my cursor to the end of the video. From there, you can adjust the box if it misaligns at any point, then re-track from that point, but I didn't need to.

That's it! The whole process just took a few minutes to complete. There are other ways to refine the tracking, such as adding individual tracking points instead of the rectangle box, and another option to remove those points as well.

@fr0sty Thanks that sounds good, similar to Mocha in that you can relocate the tracking area midway through tracking, 👍

Here's the final result. The first 5 frames are messed up, and there's a little bit of video to the right of her that didn't get properly masked out, I could easily clean that up by refining the smart mask or just masking those areas to her right out in post, but it got the job done a hell of a lot faster than I could have manually. Note I also didn't feather the mask at all, so I could have made the edges even smoother:

Original:

Smart Mask 2.0

My only gripe at this point is the render time is excessive, it took 12 minutes to render that 8 second clip on my desktop (see signature)... but I would have easily spent that time manually masking her out... if you look at the video in my post above, you can see the process of applying and motion tracking the mask was actually pretty fast.

She appears to be jamming to the oldie but goodie R&B classics of the group Jagged Edge.

hate to be "that guy", but I said it before and will say it again - these masking FX have a long way to go before they have an acceptable quality. I will stick to my hateloved greenscreen for the time being. I wouldn't release such features as long as they aren't really doing a decent job. That just creates unnecessary frustration and critiques.

It's unfortunately still 'tiktok quality' , it's acceptable there but I'd never use it.

You're setting unrealistic expectations. This isn't "AI auto green screen". This is "gets you most of the way to a clean mask, with a little manual intervention required to get the rest of the way there".

But if you were to use it to isolate an object from background it looks to be doing a better job then the tiktok app, none of that annoying flashing on edges but that could depend on complexity of background, we'll see soon

I had high expectations since they were vocal about improving the engine.
Frankly, I was disappointed. No wonder they went bankrupt.
I'm going to buy davinci. It's for the best.

I had high expectations since they were vocal about improving the engine.
Frankly, I was disappointed. No wonder they went bankrupt.
I'm going to buy davinci. It's for the best.

The video engine update isn't out yet, what are you talking about? Many of us have Davinci and VEGAS on our systems as they excel at different things.

Your expectations were so high they enabled you to time travel into the future to try out the new update that doesn't release for another 2 days... 😂

Also, they didn't go bankrupt. Restructuring does not equal bankruptcy.

You've been trash talking VEGAS and talking about switching to Resolve for 2 years now, and yet here you are... making up bogus excuses to try to trash talk the product again. That does violate the community standards, so consider yourself warned.

Here's an ACTUAL comparison of VEGAS 20 vs. VEGAS 21 Update 3's decoding capabilities.

Test conditions:

Footage: 150mbps AVC 3840x2160 29.97fps 10 bit 4:2:2 VLOG shot by Panasonic S1

Test System: Ryzen 7 1800x CPU (old, I built this system in 2017), 64GB DDR4 RAM, Windows 10, RTX 3090 GPU

Project Settings: UHD 3840x2160, 29.97fps, HDR10 Mode On (32 bit full range) in order to give it a stress test.

Results: 0.3-2fps, long pauses if you click around on the timeline as it plays, transitions make the framerate crash lower in VEGAS 20. Uneditable. A slideshow.

More than 10fps right off the jump (even if the fps counter isn't reporting it accurate at first, you can see that playback speed remains constant), clicking around to different points on the timeline doesn't crash the framerate, transitions don't slow things down, and it improves as it buffers in VEGAS 21. Editable.

A more than 4X speed improvement. Keep in mind this is just the first step of the planned video engine updates, more will be coming in future versions, but even with this, I can edit my AVC 10 bit VLOG 4:2:2 UHD footage just fine at full speed in 8 bit mode, and can even do so in HDR10 mode at and it still isn't reduced to just being a slideshow like it used to in previous versions of VEGAS. Keep in mind it's recommended (when using 10+ bit footage) that we do our cutting in 8 bit mode, and then switch it to 32 bit mode to do color grading and rendering... but I don't really have to do that anymore, 32 bit mode plays back smooth enough that, for most projects, I will probably just do my cutting in 32 bit mode as well.

On my system, both versions did pretty good in 8 bit mode, both got to full 29.97fps pretty quickly and the framerate improvements were harder to spot as a result, so I used 32 bit full range to give more of a stress test and highlight the differences.

I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard from others on the beta team that HEVC also got similar upgrades.