The Use of Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere: A Comparative Analysis of Render Times

As a creative professional, I have had the opportunity to work with both Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere, two powerful video editing software applications. In this article, we will delve into the differences between these two tools and explore their render times, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each.

One of the first things that struck me when comparing the two was the render time for a simple 1080p60 file. I set up my test files in both Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere and ran them through their respective rendering engines. In Vegas Pro, the render time was around 4 minutes and 55 seconds with maximum render quality enabled. However, in Adobe Premiere, the same file rendered in an astonishing 4 minutes and 51 seconds. This is not only a significant difference but also highlights the improvements made to Adobe Premiere's performance in recent months.

But what about the 4K30 file? I decided to test this out as well, and the results were equally impressive. In Vegas Pro, the render time was around 17 minutes and 29 seconds, while in Adobe Premiere, it took a mere 8 minutes and 31 seconds with maximum render quality enabled. Again, this is a significant difference that highlights the performance boost of Adobe Premiere.

Now, you may be wondering what factors contribute to these differences in render times. One key factor is the use of cache storage. I have found that using a dedicated SSD within my system for media cache files and scratch disks significantly speeds up video editing. In Vegas Pro, this feature was not available, so I had to render from my main C: drive instead of the network storage, which resulted in slower render times.

However, when I set up Adobe Premiere with the same caching setup, the results were dramatically different. The 1080p60 file rendered even faster, taking around 4 minutes and 51 seconds. And for the 4K30 file, it took an incredible 8 minutes and 24 seconds. This highlights the importance of using a fast storage drive for media cache files in Adobe Premiere.

Another factor that contributes to these differences is the use of CUDA-accelerated rendering. In Vegas Pro, this feature was not utilized effectively, which resulted in slower render times compared to Adobe Premiere. Adobe Premiere's reliance on CUDA acceleration gave it a significant boost in performance, allowing it to handle complex files like 4K60 Guild Wars 2 gameplay footage with ease.

In conclusion, the results of my comparative analysis of Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere reveal some interesting insights into their strengths and weaknesses. While both applications have their own unique features and advantages, Adobe Premiere appears to be the clear winner when it comes to render times. However, this may not always be the case, as different files and workflows can affect the results.

Overall, I found my experience with Adobe Premiere to be a thrilling adventure that shed light on its performance capabilities. I am excited to continue exploring the capabilities of this powerful application and sharing my findings with fellow creatives.

As I conclude this article, I want to encourage readers to leave their thoughts and suggestions in the comments below. Are there any other applications or features you would like to see explored? Do you have any questions or concerns about Adobe Premiere or Vegas Pro? I'm always eager to hear from you and share my knowledge with others.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enAdobe’s CC suite has been my main creativeplatform for a few years now. But some YouTubersstill rely on Vegas Pro (formerly of Sony,but now developed by Magix) - mainly becauseit’s easy to pirate. For shame, please tryout one of the plethora of high-quality freeor open source tools out there instead, BUTthat’s besides the point. We can debateall day whether the tools or UI of Vegas orPremiere is better, but what about rendertimes? Can we lock down a legitimate, propertest of a render comparison between the two?This wound up being a HUGE rabbit hole tojump down, rather than a simple comparison.Let’s take a look.--Actually, I’m going to cut back in hereand just say: This turned into a pretty complicatedand technical adventure. The difference isn’ta matter of A vs. B, but how the two softwareutilize different optimizations. If you wantthe cut and dry, too-long-didn’t-watch answer- Premiere renders faster than Vegas, renderingin HALF THE TIME. But to me, why that happensis much more interesting. If you want to learnmore, carry on --Sometimes video ideas, no matter how obviousthe idea is, come from the strangest places.Shoutout to TheFriendlyBroski for suggestingthe idea to me via Discord. I’m EposVox,here to make tech easier and more fun todaytrying to compare render times on my machinebetween Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere. I’musing the latest versions of each - VegasPro 14 and Adobe CC 2017 - to take advantageof the latest optimizations.For hardware, I’m running this on my mainrig - an Intel Core i7-6900K CPU with a GTX1080. My source footage files sit on my OSdrive - an Intel 750 series NVME SSD, andmy target drive to render to is a run-of-the-mill2TB 7200 RPM desktop hard drive. (In caseyou didn’t know, rendering to a differentdisk drive than your source footage resultsin faster renders.)Normally, my source footage resides on mySynology NAS and I use a secondary SSD onmy PC as a scratch disk and media cache locationfor Premiere. Vegas doesn’t let me customizethis, however, so to keep things running smooth,I kept all files local to my machine, whichis more what most people probably use, anyway.For this test, I created a sample video edit.I chose 10 video clips, of different resolutions,frame rates, and codecs to stress the render.1080p60 gameplay from my Elgato, 4k60 desktoprecordings from OBS, 4k60 gameplay recordingsfrom Nvidia Shadowplay, 1080p30 webcam recording,1080p60 camcorder shot, and so on. I alsohad 2 1080p60 alpha channel overlay lower-thirdclips that I used in the edit.I first created the edit in Vegas, takingnote of the order and timecodes of each clipI used, so that I could carefully re-createthis in Premiere. This was tedious, especiallysince Vegas’s trimmer is terrible, but Igot it done.My final video was 5 minutes and 8 seconds,ready to be rendered at 1080p 60fps and 4K30fps. I did this so that we could compareresolutions, frame rates, and scaling of varioussizes within a more realistic edit. I alsoadded some fade ins and outs to certain clips,a little contrast and saturation increaseson a couple, too. So that way it wasn’tjust raw converting footage.But this brought me to my next problem - there’s2 standard MP4 render options YouTubers usewithin Vegas - MainConcept MP4 and Sony AVCMVCMP4. So I needed to render each for both formatsso we could see which one of those was faster,too - ..except the Sony AVCMVC option doesNOT allow for a high enough bitrate for my4K30 render settings, it maxes out around26 megabits per second, which is not enough.Also, Adobe Premiere has a “Max Render Quality”toggle in its render settings. This increasesthe quality of the scaling engine during videorenders, which can sometimes slow it down.So I also rendered with and without that on.Here are the results! In Vegas, Sony AVCMVCMP4 rendered faster than MainConcept MP4,taking only 8 minutes, 46 seconds to renderthe 1080p60 file, whereas MainConcept tookabout 10 minutes and 24 seconds. Oddly enough,Sony AVCMVC also produced a much smaller file,at about 555 megabytes with an average bitrateof 15 megabits per second, versus the 1.10gigabyte file with MainConcept. I I triedto put the same bit rate (roughly) in foreach. Weird.However, Premiere Pro blew this time out ofthe park. It’s worth mentioning here thatAME, Adobe Media Encoder, often takes a longtime to write file metadata to the actualvideo file after the render has completed.This can take anywhere up to 5 minutes forreally obnoxious files. The render is done,CPU usage drops back down, but it does notfinish just yet. Because of this, I took noteof both the time elapsed shown in AME whenit finished the render and the total rendertime from AME’s text log after the metadatawrite was complete.For this 1080p60 file, Premiere took 4 minutesand 55 seconds to render the file (5 minutes15 seconds total with metadata) with max renderquality ON. With that turned off, that droppedto 4 minutes, 53 seconds, or 5 minutes 4 secondswith the metadata. That is almost HALF theamount of time that Sony Vegas took! INSANE!With the big CC 2017 update, Adobe has kickedserious ass with performance optimizations.I’ve been impressed in recent months ofusing it, but it’s nice to see it quantified.We see similar results with the 4K 30fps render.MainConcept in Vegas Pro took about 17 minutesand 29 seconds to render, while Premiere took8 minutes and 31 seconds with max render qualityon, and 8 minutes 22 seconds with max renderquality off. Again, half the time to renderin Premiere.And this render would’ve been much quicker,at least on Adobe’s side, if not for the4k60 Guild Wars 2 gameplay footage I threwin. This is a very high-bitrate, and insanelydetailed video file that slowed the renderto a halt compared to all of the other footagein the video. But it still flew through itcompared to Vegas.It was about at this point that I realizedI might have given Premiere an unfair advantage,just due to my natural workflow with it. AsI mentioned before, I utilize a dedicatedSSD within my system JUST for the media cachefiles and scratch disks in the Adobe Suite.This speeds up video editing tremendously,especially when I’m editing footage storedover the network.This isn’t an option in Vegas. I set everysetting I could to store temporary files fromthe program to that SSD, but it still alwaysstores audio peak files and such next to thesource footage. This doesn’t appear to bean option one can change at all - I did researchand found threads going back to the early2000s requesting this feature, but to no avail.This is actually what lead me to render frommy main C: drive instead of the network inthe first place, as Vegas creating peak filesover the network drive was slow as molasses.This did potentially give Premiere an advantage,I thought, since it was utilizing a featurethat Vegas could not use. So I changed theproject settings to store peak and cache filesnext to the source footage, closed Premiere,deleted the old files, opened it back andallowed it to generate new data, and renderedagain, expecting a slowdown, maybe resultsmore similar to Vegas.NOPE NOPE NOPE! I was wrong - the renderswent FASTER! Marginally. Since the drive thefiles are stored on is a PCIe NVME drive thatis way faster than my normal scratch diskSSD and can handle random reads much quicker,this setup actually shaved a few seconds offof the renders.The 1080p60 file rendered at 4 minutes 51seconds, and the 4K30 file rendered in 8 minutes,24 seconds! Both of these are with maximumrender quality ON!Of course, I’m need to continue utilizingthe SSD cache while editing from my networkstorage, but that was an interesting comparison.The SSD cache, scratch disk, and peak filestorage is one optimization boost with Premiere,the other being its reliance on CUDA-acceleratedrendering. Vegas is infamous for not doinga very good job with this. It recognizes myGTX 1080 and knows to use it, but that didn’tseem to matter.Either way, this was quite the interestinglittle adventure. I love doing stuff likethis, I just don’t always have the rightmotivation. Want to see more? Leave me suggestionsin the comments below.Otherwise, smash the like button if you enjoyed,get subscribed for more awesome tech videos,and I’ll catch you next time.\n"