Well, I've had to move back to just regular media encoder for now, but I'd still like to figure this out. AME was rendering the 5:30 footage in about 22 minutes, where voukoder was taking much longer.
I've got timelapse footage that is 5568x4176. Already, ffmpeg won't let you use Cuda for that, so neither will Voukoder right? But my graphics card, nvidia 3080 Ti, can output and encode at least 6k. But maybe not in h.264.
I ended up using AME, using Main 10, High Tier, and a key frame distance of 1, H.265. After importing that footage into a NLE, it feels just as smooth as ProRes. I thought H.265 was more demanding, so I was surprised that footage was so smooth.
That being said, even with the "Render at Maximum Depth" checkbox, the footage is limited to 4.2.0, but the original is 4.2.2
For Voukoder, I looked at all of the H.264 codecs, but found that the (x264) codec had the most options. I know many options only show up if you have another option selected, but I hadn't been able to get a key frame interval to appear.
But ideally, I'd want to use GPU to render, so now I'm looking at HEVC (NVIDIA NVENC).
From seeing what is available in Voukoder 12.2, if I want YUV422, I'll actually have to use YUV444. Is that correct?
But I still can't figure out how to get all i-frames. I've done that in ffmpeg, using H.265, which doesn't limit me to 4096 width, but I have to use yuv444 there as well. But also, there's something else to making the video smooth in Premiere because I Did get all i-frames, and the correct bit depth, and I'm not losing to yuv420, but it's still not smooth when moving the playhead around, and that's the goal...to keep a decent the color info in tact, and just control the compression quality and resolution to control the size. This way, it would work really well for ProRes alternatives in terms of Actual editability, and also for scrubbing with smaller proxies.