video rendering vs quality the best

marcinzm wrote on 2/19/2024, 4:25 PM

Hello,

Do you have some knowledge about quality comparision between Vegas Pro 21 vs Adobe Premiere vs Davinci Resolve?

I mean the quality comparision vs time of rendering in this three softwares.

One of the Vegas Pro forum user informed me that if I want to get the best quality result in final output video in Vegas I must render using CPU and set slow render mode. The slowest render I set, then I get the best quality in final output video file - he wrote to me. I know that it is a truth, but what about this in other softwares? Is slowest rendering also required to get the best quality result in Adobe Premiere and Davinci Resolve? Do they have to do rendering via CPU either for best quality result?

I know that this forum is about Vegas, but I know that some of you use other softwares too and maybe some of you have knowledge about this. If I asked this question on Adobe Premiere forum, some of their user could reply that this is not Vegas and Davinci Resolve forum. So I hope you don't ignore me. I believe in you. I hope you know what I mean and some of you can share their knowledge with me and other users.

Regards
Marcin

Comments

Former user wrote on 2/19/2024, 4:53 PM

One of the biggest negatives regarding quality is that Vegas by default is still an 8bit editor, all other editors work in 32 bit floating point color precision. I believe in VP21 they have improved the performance of 32bit FP, but not to the degree they can run it as default .

Some believe if they use 420 8bit media and encode to 420 8bit this does not cause quality issues, but it does due to limited color palette when manipulating video. Vegas is slower to encode, but it's also slower at playback, it will drop frames where other editors don't, this points to the slowness being due to a lack of efficiency of it's render engine.

Hardware encoding is less efficient not necessarily lower quality. It is lower quality for a given file size when deliberately creating compact files, and you should never use it in such cases. But when you encode by quality (ie CRF values) rather then bitrate or file size you have similar quality but the hardware encode will be larger. Others I"m sure will have a different opinion.

mark-y wrote on 2/19/2024, 5:23 PM

You won't see much difference between encoding in different applications, given the same codecs, identical formats, and no filters in the pipeline.

The advice you seem to be repurposing has to do mainly with Hardware vs. Software encoding, which is format-centric, not something that varies much between applications.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 2/19/2024, 5:56 PM

@marcinzm Don't have Premier but do have Vegas & Resolve. And have done allot of quality analysis with both. Vegas Magix presets measure better across the board. And MainConcept, which uses only the CPU to render, is the slowest and highest quality of the Magix presets. That doesn't mean that rendering a project with MainConcept will not use a gpu for pre-render functions, however. Using a gpu for decoding, timeline, and FX processing can increase MainConcept render quality and makes higher quality 32-bit fp processing more practical. I often do my editing with 8-bit projects and use Qsv or Nvenc for test renders. Then switch to 32-bit fp and MainConcept for delivery.

Former user wrote on 2/19/2024, 6:12 PM

@marcinzm Don't have Premier but do have Vegas & Resolve. And have done allot of quality analysis with both. Vegas Magix presets measure better across the board. And MainConcept, which uses only the CPU to render, is the slowest and highest quality of the Magix presets.

@Howard-Vigorita The Resolve H.264 software encoder is notoriously bad at default settings, there are values that can be changed that are said to improve it's quality a lot, but I don't use it, I use voukoder

andrewcg wrote on 2/19/2024, 11:37 PM

I tested Magix H.264 codec and found GPU (NVEC/AVC) renders are very fast but have lower quality compared to CPU renders.

RogerS wrote on 2/19/2024, 11:59 PM

See Howard's signature for encoder quality tests.

If you want the speed of GPU renders but need more quality increase the bitrate.

phil-d wrote on 2/20/2024, 8:52 AM

Software encoding is always better quality than hardware encoding, assuming all other things are equal.

Hardware encoding is always faster than software encoding, assuming all other things are equal.

Providing hardware encoding uses a decent bit-rate, the difference in quality becomes close enough not to be able to spot a difference, so you gain rendering speed for very little difference in quality. I render 4K footage H264 at around 70Mbps using Intel QuickSync, and no one has been able to see a difference compared to the same bit-rate but using X264.

If you are needing very small file sizes, then software will be better, and the cost to that is time. Even then if you are really pushing file sizes software will still come out looking poor.

marcinzm wrote on 2/21/2024, 5:36 AM

Thank you for your replies.

What do you think about Voukoder? I use this rendering Voukoder codec for all of my projects. I use 13.3 version.

I use X265 encoding, and preset: slower, high bitrate value

I have Sony FX3 camera. I always record 4:2:2 10bit 200 Mbps 50p videos.

As I have mentioned before, I use Voukoder codec to render output videos.

Do I need to change Pixel format from default: 8-bit (full range) in Project Properties settings to different value to get the best quality result in output rendered video? If so, which one I should choose in my case?

Regards
Marcin

RogerS wrote on 2/21/2024, 5:52 AM

Voukoder's fine and x265 is a software encoder. Just use a high enough bitrate to avoid artifacts, it doesn't have to be the same as the source.

For the FX3 if you are shooting Slog3 you want to be pixel format 32-bit full view transform off to get a higher quality log to Rec 709 transform. (I assume you are using a LUT or color grading panel to transform as you are using 8-bit full. ACES in VEGAS is another option).

If you aren't shooting flat, 10-bit 422 may be more quality than needed taking up more space and being harder to play back.