MAGIX AVC Codec Comparisons: NVIDIA vs MAIN CONCEPT vs SONY / Vegas Pro
This is not a scientific test; we rendered out the same exact footage and the only difference was the codecs used. In Vegas Pro, we compared three AVC codecs. Main Concept, Nvidia, and Sony. To be honest, they all seemed to do a pretty good job and the main difference we noticed was strangely in tonality. Main Concept seemed to render out the lightest and Sony the darkest. But all the differences appear rather subtle. To our eyes, it looks like Sony AVC seemed to have a slight edge over the others in terms of detail. We have done some preliminary tests comparing HEVC to AVC and interestingly, AVC seems to hold more detail. Since HEVC uses coding tree units up to 64 x 64 blocks, it would make sense that AVC might hold an edge there, but that comes at the cost of increased rendering time and file size.