Very poor playback performance

Liam-Robinson wrote on 11/15/2025, 4:02 PM

Hi there.

I have recently bought the Vegas Pro 23 Suite and was very disappointed with the lacklustre performance of the software. Especially the lagginess of the preview window and just doing simple tasks such as cutting and moving clips. It cannot be the type of CODEC my footage is running because I am using 1080p footage, MPEG-4 with a H.264 format. For some reason when I add a crop effect to any clip it absolutely destroys Vegas Pro and crashes.

 

The PC running VEGAS Pro:

AMD Ryzen 7 5700x3d - 8c, 16thread

32GB DDR4 3600Mhz Memory

All ran off a Cruical NVME drive

RTX 4070 GPU running the non-gaming version of graphics drivers.

 

Please help me as I do not have this issue with Premiere Pro, but I couldn't justify the annual or monthly cost!

Comments

RogerS wrote on 11/15/2025, 10:58 PM

Could you share MediaInfo for the footage? Is just playing back the footage with no crop or Fx also laggy?

Liam-Robinson wrote on 11/16/2025, 3:56 AM

Could you share MediaInfo for the footage? Is just playing back the footage with no crop or Fx also laggy?

Sure!

And no, playing back multiple streams of this clip stacked on top of eachother without any FX playback absolutely fine.

Media information
  Stream format: MPEG-4
  Video stream #1
    Video format: AVC
    Resolution: 3840 x 1080 px
    Aspect ratio: 3.556
    Color depth: 8 bit
    Frame rate: 60.000 fps
    Scan type: Progressive
    Bit rate mode: Constant
    Bit rate: 24000585 bps
  Audio stream #1
    Audio format: AAC
    Sampling rate: 48000 Hz
    Channels: 2 channels
    Bit rate mode: Constant
    Bit rate: 162495 bps
  Audio stream #2
    Audio format: AAC
    Sampling rate: 48000 Hz
    Channels: 2 channels
    Bit rate mode: Constant
    Bit rate: 162495 bps
  Audio stream #3
    Audio format: AAC
    Sampling rate: 48000 Hz
    Channels: 2 channels
    Bit rate mode: Constant
    Bit rate: 162495 bps

3POINT wrote on 11/16/2025, 4:39 AM

Which camera produces a 3840×1080p60 resolution AVC stream? Or is this a weird screen capture recording?

Liam-Robinson wrote on 11/16/2025, 5:10 AM

It's OBS and I'm doing a dual screen setup.

3POINT wrote on 11/16/2025, 5:22 AM

It's OBS and I'm doing a dual screen setup.

Than check your OBS recording settings. I'm not a screencapturing expert, but you are felt the 1001 screencapture here with wrong OBS settings. Probably others can tell you which settings are correct.

Liam-Robinson wrote on 11/16/2025, 5:36 AM

It's OBS and I'm doing a dual screen setup.

Than check your OBS recording settings. I'm not a screencapturing expert, but you are felt the 1001 screencapture here with wrong OBS settings. Probably others can tell you which settings are correct.

I have checked my OBS Settings and tried multiple encoders. Currently I'm using Nvidia's AV1 encoder. But I do not see how a crop FX could drastically diminish my playback performance to the point it's unusable?

RogerS wrote on 11/16/2025, 12:57 PM

Try a h264 capture with keyframe interval to 1 for easy to playback media. I also notice slowdowns with pan crop; hopefully that will be improved.

Last changed by RogerS on 11/16/2025, 2:07 PM, changed a total of 1 times.

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VEGAS Pro 21.208
VEGAS Pro 22.250
VEGAS Pro 23.302

Try the
VEGAS 4K "sample project" benchmark (works with VP 16+): https://forms.gle/ypyrrbUghEiaf2aC7
VEGAS Pro 20 "Ad" benchmark (works with VP 20+): https://forms.gle/eErJTR87K2bbJc4Q7

Liam-Robinson wrote on 11/16/2025, 2:35 PM

I'm using H264 with a keyframe interval set to 1. And it plays back fine with one clip in the timeline, but as soon as I add another one on top it just goes to shit and is unusable.

bitman wrote on 11/17/2025, 4:21 AM

@Liam-Robinson Perhaps enable legacy AVC decoding in the I/O file tab of the preferences. It uses a different (probably older) decoder for your clips. Older is not always worse. Newer is not always better...

For the record, with my system and GPU and my source clips and stills from a Sony camera, I have to enable legacy AVC decoding until they fix the default setting.

Last changed by bitman on 11/17/2025, 4:26 AM, changed a total of 2 times.

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Liam-Robinson wrote on 11/17/2025, 7:23 AM

@Liam-Robinson Perhaps enable legacy AVC decoding in the I/O file tab of the preferences. It uses a different (probably older) decoder for your clips. Older is not always worse. Newer is not always better...

For the record, with my system and GPU and my source clips and stills from a Sony camera, I have to enable legacy AVC decoding until they fix the default setting.

Hi bitman. Unfortunately that is the first thing I tried and it makes no difference. Preview Playback isn't the issue now it is just the slow performance when trying to cut clips or drag clips around the timeline. It takes a good 5 seconds when I try to cut a clip.

TimeTree wrote on 11/17/2025, 12:36 PM

Hi there.

I have recently bought the Vegas Pro 23 Suite and was very disappointed with the lacklustre performance of the software. Especially the lagginess of the preview window and just doing simple tasks such as cutting and moving clips. It cannot be the type of CODEC my footage is running because I am using 1080p footage, MPEG-4 with a H.264 format. For some reason when I add a crop effect to any clip it absolutely destroys Vegas Pro and crashes.

 

The PC running VEGAS Pro:

AMD Ryzen 7 5700x3d - 8c, 16thread

32GB DDR4 3600Mhz Memory

All ran off a Cruical NVME drive

RTX 4070 GPU running the non-gaming version of graphics drivers.

 

Please help me as I do not have this issue with Premiere Pro, but I couldn't justify the annual or monthly cost!

After a few updates the same keeps happening to me where the preview window keeps glitching out, just try and close and re-open the software after saving your project, Hopefully they'll have another update to resolve this issue more efficiently.