I almost never shoot I just get footage on hard drives from people. The clips I am having trouble with are H264. They work fine until I have about 20 of them in the project then it goes black... I guess I'm just looking for what people think Vegas handles best. I want to load lots and lots of clips into a project without it getting funky.

Which version and built of Vegas do you have? I'm having no problem with loading hundreds of H.264 based videofiles (1080i50, 1080p50 and also 2160p25).

Vegas 14 latest build. Tried it on two different PCs and one of them is really good. Might be something wrong with these specific H264s. Even then what codec would you render into and do you have any advice for batch encoding them?

I would look at the specifics your .264 footage. Where did it come from? What container is it in? Is this game capture footage in a variable frame rate? "Media info" will help here, its an app. See the FAQ on Media info posting.

What kind system specs are the two machines your are testing on?

Thanks for that, cool app

Details are:

The footage comes from someone's final cut on a Mac.

MPEG-4 Quicktime
video stream: AVC
Overall bit Rate : 71.6 Mb/s
1920x1080
29.970 FPS 
also says AVC (High@L4)(CABAC/3RefFrames)

FIRST PC IS :
64 GB RAM
i7-6700K CPU (4GHz)
NIVIDA Ge Force GTX 1070

SECOND PC IS:
24 GB RAM
i7 X980 @ 3.33GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470

Have tried both with GPU on and off

Still would love to know what people think the ideal codec for Vegas is and i'll try render into that.

Vegas 14 latest build. Tried it on two different PCs and one of them is really good. Might be something wrong with these specific H264s. Even then what codec would you render into and do you have any advice for batch encoding them?

I would batch render them with the Sony AVC codec. Batch rendering is easy done by putting all footage on the timeline, create regions for every event (I do this with a script) and lean back when the batch render script renders those regions.

Ok now that sounds amazing. Do you have a batch render script I could get or shall i just google "Vegas Batch Render script" ?

What is the best Video Codec to use in Vegas?

Best for what? You’d use a different codec if you wanted to archive the footage and a different one if you wanted to upload it to YouTube, or enter it into a film festival, or distribute it on DVD, Blu-ray, USB stick, etc.

There is no one codec that is just best for everything.

Just for working inside Vegas so the footage is highest quality but at the same time works as seamless as possible. Drive space not an issue but don't want to use uncompressed. Rendering the file for YouTube, Film Festival etc can all happen later I just mean so it works well inside Vegas. And the footage is mostly stuff like Robot fights from Transformers movies so needs to handle that well.

Ok now that sounds amazing. Do you have a batch render script I could get or shall i just google "Vegas Batch Render script" ?

The Batch render script is already present in Vegas, (under Tools/Scripting/Batch render), but to make it Batch rendering you have to create Regions first for every event (which I do with the AddRegionsToEvents script)

Thank You very much. You reckon AVC is great quality right? (i assume this is my last silly question of the day)

Just for working inside Vegas so the footage is highest quality but at the same time works as seamless as possible.

Oh, in that case, just use whatever your camera gives you. Any time you change it to something else, chances are you lose some detail.

AVC decoded by compoundplug.dll generally plays nicely in Vegas.

Which plugin is Vegas using to decode your AVC footage from the Mac user? (right click on a file in the Vegas Explorer window, choose "Properties", and scroll to the bottom). If it's Quicktime (qt7plug.dll) then you could try losslessly rewrapping the footage to MP4 with FFmpeg so it gets decoded by compoundplug.dll.

If the footage is already being decoded by compoundplug.dll then take a look at this thread for some external conversion options. In my opinion, transcoding to Sony AVC from the Vegas timeline is not really a good option as you will lose quality. There are better near-lossless options such as XAVC-I. Anyway the batch render script isn't a great solution if your clips are not decoding properly on the timeline.

Which sense does it make to transcode AVC to XAVC?

Which sense does it make to transcode AVC to XAVC?

Why not? The OP wants an intermediate codec to edit with. XAVC Intra is a good choice. If the footage has to be re-rendered (i.e. rewrapping doesn't help), there's no inherent benefit to keeping it as AVC if it can't be smart rendered.

Option A:
GoPro Studio is your friend
https://shop.gopro.com/EMEA/softwareandapp/quik-|-desktop/Quik-Desktop.html
It does batch transcoding to CineForm wavelet codec. Set Quality = Film Scan 2. Everything lower is mediocre, to say it politely.

Option B:
Urge those "guys with FinalCut" to provide you with ProRes 444, and call it a day.

* * *

If you are in position to issue your TechRequirements for others to comply, the "B" is the best&ideal for you, since you won't have to take extra/unnecessary workload on yourself. ProRes - the industry standard - is good for them (their native format) and is good for Vegas 14 (and so for you). If you're "not in position" then get yourself accustomed to "GoPro Studio" - it's free & it's easy to operate. Until the day you are in position 🙂

Using Transformer movie clips in a YouTube video without permission runs the risk of being flagged, removed, or worse.

Using Transformer movie clips in a YouTube video without permission runs the risk of being flagged, removed, or worse.

I think i'm OK. If you use other people's music you are almost certainly going to be Content ID flagged but if you are only using small snippets of movies or tv shows they never get flagged. In fact I've had a few remixes where the owner of the content has shared it themselves, used it for promo and even hired me.

AVC decoded by compoundplug.dll generally plays nicely in Vegas.

Which plugin is Vegas using to decode your AVC footage from the Mac user? (right click on a file in the Vegas Explorer window, choose "Properties", and scroll to the bottom). If it's Quicktime (qt7plug.dll) then you could try losslessly rewrapping the footage to MP4 with FFmpeg so it gets decoded by compoundplug.dll.

If the footage is already being decoded by compoundplug.dll then take a look at this thread for some external conversion options. In my opinion, transcoding to Sony AVC from the Vegas timeline is not really a good option as you will lose quality. There are better near-lossless options such as XAVC-I. Anyway the batch render script isn't a great solution if your clips are not decoding properly on the timeline.

Sweet, I will definitely be trying this out. For the moment I went with AVC which is working like a dream in Vegas but I do understand the slight loss of quality so at the end I'm going to swap out the reference files for uncompressed or something else. I am just doing so many cuts I wanted something smooth to work with.

Another silly question for everyone. How can I render AVC in Non Progressive way? Upper Field seems to be the only option.

Option B:

Urge those "guys with FinalCut" to provide you with ProRes 444, and call it a day.

But then remember to chop off the first couple of frames of every clip, which don't decode correctly in VP14 build 211.