Breaking the Speed Limit with VEGAS Pro 15

Let’s say you needed to travel from Los Angeles to Berlin. You’d need to be in the air for 12 hours and six minutes. If you had to make that trip regularly – say every week or so – the time spent in the air would really begin to grate on your nerves. Or, let’s say you need to renew your driver’s license down at the local Division of Motor Vehicles. You might stand in line for two hours waiting for your turn. How would you feel if the next time you needed to make that Berlin trip you went to buy a ticket and the nice man said, “Oh, I can get you there in just six hours and three minutes.” Or the lady at the DMV came to you and said, “Sir, if you stand in this line, I’ll get you out of here in an hour.” Who wouldn’t be thrilled at speeds twice as fast and waiting times half as long? That’s right, no one. Everyone would be ecstatic to cut the time it takes to do annoying-but-necessary tasks in half. Well, that being the truth, then you will be thrilled with the new render speeds of VEGAS Pro 15!

Render times up to two times as fast

We know it’s been a long time coming for true improvements in the area of hardware acceleration for rendering in VEGAS Pro. When we took over production of VEGAS Pro nearly a year and a half ago, nothing was closer to the top of our priority list than this. In VEGAS Pro 14, we introduced hardware-accelerated HEVC rendering for both 8-bit and 10-bit rendering. Those speeds didn’t make much of a splash because you had nothing to compare them to. HEVC rendering was new to that version, so you had fast rendering right out of the gate.

But that still left a lot of long render times for other formats. Let’s be clear: not all formats are technically able to benefit from hardware acceleration, but we knew we could make significant and noticeable strides with some formats. So, with version 15, we focused on one of the most important – AVC/AAC MP4 – so that the improvements could benefit the largest number of users right from the start. Now with the new version, we offer you render times that can be as much as half as long as your render times in previous versions. That means render speeds up to two times as fast. So you spend less time – significantly less time – waiting for your renders to complete.

Hardware acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards and Intel Skylake processors

As our initial step, we’ve implemented two different types of hardware acceleration when rendering to the MAGIX AVC/AAC MP4 format. First, those of you with modern NVIDIA graphics cards – specifically GeForce 600 series onward (6xx, 7xx, 9xx, 10xx) and Quadro Kxxx, Mxxx and Pxxx – can now take advantage of acceleration through NVENC technology. Second, users with computers equipped with later versions of Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) – specifically, Intel Skylake or newer processors for 8-bit AVC encoding – will also see speed improvements. And these are results you can directly compare to previous render times. Not just small improvements either. In our tests, we’ve seen rendering speeds up to two times as fast with both technologies. That’s half the time spent rendering those videos for YouTube and anywhere else you need to deliver an MP4!

 There’s more to come…

While those render speed improvements are great, we didn’t stop there. Just because VEGAS Pro 15 has been released doesn’t mean we’ve stopped working on it. We’ve already released a very robust update, and among other things, that update features more speed improvements. This time, those improvements are on the reading side instead of the rendering side. Again, we turn to QSV to speed things up. Also, we’ve again concentrated our efforts on the popular MP4 format, so that with the update one version of VEGAS Pro 15 on QSV enabled systems, you will see significant performance improvements when reading most flavors of MP4. That means you’ll see your video previews at the true frame rate more often, even at higher preview quality settings. And you’ll see higher frame rates even when you’ve applied effects, compositing, and other processor-intensive operations to your MP4 footage. In other words, this acceleration brings you that much closer to previewing your project as it will really look once rendered.

We know it’s an old saying, but time really is money. The more time it takes for you to get your work done, the less time you have to get creative, or to get another project done. When you have to get to Berlin before that big project falls through, getting there in half the time means you can save the day. Getting your project rendered in half the time means you can beat that critical deadline more easily. Or it means you can devote a little extra time to the creative aspect of your art and less time on the technical requirements. And we’re not done yet. We’ll continue to do what we can to make VEGAS Pro faster so that you can work faster… Or, find more time for that trip to Berlin you’ve always wanted to make!