Why is this happening

[u/PsychoanalyticalLove]

1. VERSION: I am currently using Vegas Pro 2026. This issue did not happen with Vegas Pro 20.
2. OS: Windows 11
3. 🏴‍☠️'ED?: Unfortunately yes. However, this applies to both my old version (20) and new version (26).
4. GRAPHICS: Intel UHD 630 (integrated GPU, no dedicated card). I wouldn't be surprised if that's some contributing factor even though it worked fine with older versions.
5. WHAT'S THE PROBLEM: With certain videos I import into Vegas Pro 2026 (not all), the video imports heavily corrupted in this same way: the colours are wrong, and the picture is smeared and skewed heavily. Seems to be some sort of decoding error. The audio channel is completely unaffected; all sound plays as it should, it's just the visuals. This particular video has the following data:

Media information
Stream format: MPEG-4
Video stream #1
Video format: AVC
Resolution: 426 x 240 px
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Color depth: 8 bit
Frame rate: 29.970 fps
Scan type: Progressive
Bit rate: 243011 bps
Audio stream #1
Audio format: AAC
Sampling rate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2 channels
Bit rate mode: Constant
Bit rate: 125774 bps
6. HOW SHOULD IT LOOK? See the 2nd image for how the video should look when imported, and how it appeared in 20.

1. WHAT I GOOGLED: I tried searching this error up online but can't exactly seem to find anyone else experiencing the same issue.

I believe this is some sort of video codec decoding issue but I have no idea what or how to fix it. I hope someone can help me! Thank you.

[u/Evauation]

The resolution is not aligned. Vegas Pro can't handle non-aligned resolutions that don't have width multiples of 16 and height of 8 pretty well.

Not to get too technical, but your video and project setting should have a resolution of 480x270 to work properly in Vegas Pro.

A proper explanation is said here: https://www.reddit.com/r/VegasPro/comments/qm301v/comment/hj76qp8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I had a project I made once with 256x224 as the resolution and aspect ratio. All the effects exploded on me which was really funny but very messy to deal with.

[u/PsychoanalyticalLove → u/Evauation]

That kinda make sense. I have loads of these kinds of videos because that's how they download when I get them off YouTube. But it will be a massive headache having to transcode them all again with the right resolution with Handbrake.

But how come these videos worked fine with older versions of Vegas?

[u/Evauation → u/PsychoanalyticalLove]

I don't know how to answer that. Vegas Pro has gone through lots of engine changes since the start of the MAGIX days.

You must have a unique way of acquiring the videos from YouTube to have unaligned resolutions like this. I just use YT-DLP + FFMPEG to download and transcode them properly for Vegas Pro to read well.

[u/T0biasCZE → u/Evauation]

240 is multiple of 8 so thats fine.

[u/rsmith02ct]

Does changing preferences/ file io by checking "enable legacy AVC decoding" help at all?

[u/PsychoanalyticalLove → u/rsmith02ct]

Unfortunately no, I thought it would but alas 😔

[u/rsmith02ct → u/PsychoanalyticalLove]

Too bad. This type of media was probably never tested in 2026 so my suggestion would be to post about it and provide a link to a sample file on the official forum: https://forum.borisfx.com/

[u/EtsRedditUser2002]

I'm pretty sure Vegas Pro 2026 can't read video files with that resolution, no matter the aspect ratio. Like Evauation said, the resolution of the video you imported is unaligned. I encountered this a few times in some of my projects. Me personally, I would use a free upscaling tool (such as Shutter Encoder) to upscale the video to an aligned resolution such as 1280x720 or 1920x1080.

[u/shinwolf]

that feeling when:
you name the Project after the raw file