I haven't noticed Voukoder darkening the image; it's always full scale. Which Vegas and Voukoder are you using?

Latest Vegas 22, Latest Voukoder and plugin. I have not noticed the darker image either, but I don't usually use gray scale gradients or prores 444. It is most likely prores444 that's the problem. I tried using using the video levels Voukoder option to reverse the darkening but that results in a black image.

Would seem like a Voukoder Vegas plugin problem and as I"m using classic not pro, that will never be fixed.

What format does Vegas send data to the encoder, specifically Voukoder? RGB, YUV? 8-32 bits? Rec709? Limited range or full?

@Alan-Smithee The api and sdk are not public. I suspect the few developers that it's shared with are under NDA. The basic format seems to be binary before pixel encoding... based on DebugMode Frameserver being able to render a variety of pixel formats:

My guess is that the default bitrate of the connecting pipe is constrained, based on quality analysis I've done on DM Frame Server and Voukouder renders compared to Vegas native presets which yield substantially higher quality metrics. However, MagicYUV apparently knows how to open a higher quality pipe with resulting metrics more on par with Vegas-native.

For some reason I thought Voukoder on Vegas was limited to 10bit maybe related to the smaller pipeline to maintain quality but that can't be true for 3388 colors on a darkened grayscale image, it likely would have 3899 unique colors if processed correctly but that says nothing about quality of that data I guess.

Latest Vegas 22, Latest Voukoder and plugin. I have not noticed the darker image either, but I don't usually use gray scale gradients or prores 444. It is most likely prores444 that's the problem. I tried using using the video levels Voukoder option to reverse the darkening but that results in a black image.

Would seem like a Voukoder Vegas plugin problem and as I"m using classic not pro, that will never be fixed.

 

That's the same setup I used.
Incidentally, with this setup, you need to render the video with Voukoder and render audio to WAV. Then you mux it with ffmpeg. Otherwise, you'll get audio that's offset by two frames. The new Vegas doesn't have the audio offset bug, which the old Voukoder mitigates with a filter -- now this fix for an old bug that's causing a new bug.

 

@Alan-Smithee The api and sdk are not public. I suspect the few developers that it's shared with are under NDA. The basic format seems to be binary before pixel encoding... based on DebugMode Frameserver being able to render a variety of pixel formats:However, MagicYUV apparently knows how to open a higher quality pipe with resulting metrics more on par with Vegas-native.

I suppose the encoder can negotiate with Vegas what it wants to receive.
Hmm, I'm increasingly considering switching to Resolve -- it would eliminate most of the weird issues.

For some reason I thought Voukoder on Vegas was limited to 10bit maybe related to the smaller pipeline to maintain quality but that can't be true for 3388 colors on a darkened grayscale image, it likely would have 3899 unique colors if processed correctly but that says nothing about quality of that data I guess.

Have you tried rendering to FFV1 16-bit and then to ProRes_ks using ffmpeg?

I get 1786 unique colors for FFMPEG PRKS 444 encode of RGBA 16bit FFV1 . What i'm doing is generating the video encode, using MPC-HC to playback and take a 24bit BMP image, then load into infranview to detect unique colors. Could be a flawed procedure

 

@Alan-Smithee The api and sdk are not public. I suspect the few developers that it's shared with are under NDA. The basic format seems to be binary before pixel encoding... based on DebugMode Frameserver being able to render a variety of pixel formats:However, MagicYUV apparently knows how to open a higher quality pipe with resulting metrics more on par with Vegas-native.

I suppose the encoder can negotiate with Vegas what it wants to receive.
Hmm, I'm increasingly considering switching to Resolve -- it would eliminate most of the weird issues.

@rgr Fwiw, last time I tested I got the same range of lower-quality metrics from Resolve Studio native transcodes as I did with the free Voukoder plugin to vp22 or Resolve... they all seem to sacrifice quality for performance. Direct ffmpeg transcodes, however, gave me the highest metrics with pretty decent performance.

But Voukoder is just ffmpeg... The question is what does the encoder receive from Vegas.

Okay maybe I can help here and you can help me too. I remember there was an issue with some older version of VEGAS Pro, so it could totally be it somehow is still there.

First, I suggest recommend to use a mathematically lossless format in the encoder and then compare the encoded frames.

Okay maybe I can help here and you can help me too. I remember there was an issue with some older version of VEGAS Pro, so it could totally be it somehow is still there.

First, I suggest recommend to use a mathematically lossless format in the encoder and then compare the encoded frames.

@Vouk 1+. I usually use the lossless-hevc clip linked in my profile which is made from a zraw clip which uses lossless-hevc as its native format. One possible variable is Vegas hevc decoding whose metrics come in a slight bit lower than ffmpeg decoding & transcoding, which is the best... in any event Vegas decoding is common to all native render presets and plugins. Other possible variables are intermediate register widths, numerical representations, and math libs... whatever ffmpeg is doing is what I'd recommend everyone adopts.