Vegas is notorious for not benefiting from hot graphics card hardware. Which you'd know if you had any experience with it. I've been working with Vegas for over a decade, on over a dozen different graphics cards.
I'm here to share what I know, because somebody asked. I didn't come here to waste time arguing with somebody who has no experience with Vegas and who clearly doesn't know what they're talking about.
"I haven't used Vegas Pro so I could only guess."
Regarding dedicated graphics card for encoding, low-end Nvidia Turing (except GTX 1630 and GTX 1650) cards are best at the moment. Any Nvidia card from 1650 Super and up.
Turing cards (16/20-series) encode notably better h.264/h.265 picture quality for the same bitrate vs. Pascal cards (10-series). Difference to me looks about the same as decreasing the Constant Quantizer setting by 1, but with the same filesize.
Ampere cards (30-series) use the same NVENC module as Turing. The NVDEC decoder has a slight improvement, but not the encoder.
Lovelace cards (40-series) have better NVENC modules, but are outside your $200 range at the moment.
Worth noting too that a higher-end card won't gain you much encoding performance. Turing and Ampere cards all have the same NVENC encode module, which has nothing to do with how big the GPU is, how many CUDA cores etc. Separate module. (If you're doing effects or filters etc. where you also use CUDA, that's different...) The only encoder difference between a 1650 Super and a 3090 Ti is memory bus width/speed; they both have the same NVENC module.
The RTX 2060 Super has a 256-bit memory bus with 14 Gbps GDDR6. Might be close to the sweet spot for you.
Glad it works!
Ignore what i said earlier about there being a problem with the resolution. I was exceeding the max resolution of my target output format. Duh!
It's something to do with your resolution. I tried a known working project on my rig (VP15, 3060Ti, Voukoder 13.0.2, Nvidia driver v531.29DCH patched with keylase), and I can make it choke by changing either of the resolution values (width or height) to your values. Tried 2400x3600, 1920x3600, 2400x1080. In all 3 cases, I get the following error in the log when ffmpeg is being initialized:
FFmpeg: InitializeEncoder failed: invalid param (8): Invalid Level.
When setting resolution back to 1920x1080, everything works again.
According to the documentation, NVENC resolution limit for everything from Pascal to Lovelace is 8192x8192, so it shouldn't be an NVENC problem. Either FFmpeg doesn't like your resolution, or it's not receiving the correct syntax from Voukoder.
You could test for an FFmpeg limitation by CPU-rendering a small test file in Vegas and then trying to re-encode the file using FFmpeg and the NVENC encoder directly from command line.
There might be more than one problem with your settings. Is this log from before or after you changed to progressive video?
Newer NVENC cards (starting with Turing) also can't encode interlaced video, which you have enabled in your first screenshot (the Field Order option). Try progressive video instead.
Log file might shed some light.
What's your project audio bit depth? 16 or 24-bit? Try 48 kHz 16-bit, see if it helps.
Enable advanced logging in Voukoder, then try rendering again and check the log file.
No point stumbling around in the dark trying to find the problem when you can ask the program itself what it's crabby about!
So it's not viable for VP to use the x264/x265 libraries ONLY if they are present in the FFmpeg build? (Which would only happen if the user has chosen to download and compile their own version of FFmpeg, manually enabling these encoders.)
Is there a way to have the user download/install ffmpeg separately for free? This might remove the requirement for you to buy commercial licenses.
IIRC, Handbrake has an "update ffmpeg" function in it somewhere.
[20:05:24] Interlaced: Top first
...
[20:05:24] FFmpeg: Interlaced encoding is not supported. Supported level: 0
Do you understand what INTERLACED video is? Go look it up.
You need to render as PROGRESSIVE video in order to use NVENC.
Select your template, hit Customize Template, and hit the X button (Delete Template) next to the Save button.
I'm in love, dude.
Is this just a concept drawing to show how the program would behave, or is this what you intend the UI to look like? That's some serious heavy-hitter stuff, either way!
The CCFS CuminCode FrameServer schmuck is happy to charge for his crap programming skills and lousy work ethic. Voukoder works several times faster, and is so much easier to use. Voukoder has no equal that I'm aware of. And believe me, I've looked! Especially if multiple streams and filters will soon be supported . . . Your program is vastly better and worth AT LEAST what he's charging ($15). Possibly 2-3+ times as much.
Keeping in mind that most of us paid for the NLE suites that we use Voukoder on.
One thing I would add is that a trial period of 1 week is NOT long enough. That's what CCFS is currently doing, and it did not make me happy. I've got other things in my life that need attention too, and I can't take a week off just to learn a new program. In my experience as a consumer, 1 month is a comfortable time period to figure out if a program will actually do what you need. I needed a couple solid weeks of working with TMPGEnc before deciding to buy it.
P.S., I decided not to buy CCFS. Total garbage.
Awesome! Very much looking forward to it!
Here's how to check in TAW6 whether your source file is compatible or not :
Note that TAW6 uses fields, not frames, to indicate it's max GOP size. Voukoder "48 frames" = TAW6 "96 fields".
I couldn't find a setting for CABAC
Then I'm guessing your particular GPU only does CABAC encoding.
Just did a test because I was curious, and it seems that TAW will also accept CAVLC encoding.
What was probably messing you up last time is the Group-of-Pictures max size (GOP). Most encoders have a really large value by default, mine is 300. For Blu-ray though, this number has to be manually limited to 48 or less (for 24p video).
Just to clarify, feel free to experiment with the other settings, as you can tweak your picture quality and encode speed quite a bit. @avwtp's settings will probably give you a much better picture than mine. But the settings that are absolutely critical to Blu-ray compatibility are listed in my last post.
