Yep, that's why I suggest you to export first, and then encode into different formats
You suggest that I export 19 hrs of uncompressed 1080p video . . . okay, let's run some numbers, shall we?
Ignoring the PCM audio stream, at 100MiB/s uncompressed video-only data rate, that's around 6.2 TiB of data. A SUSTAINED write speed of 1.4 GiB/s would be needed to store the data fast enough (more on that in a minute). That's a respectable hard drive!
As is, let's take a 7-hr block of video for example (a pair of 3.5 hr videos). I currently run 4 instances of Vegas in parallel (dual-CPU system). Each instance of Vegas is running Voukoder and hardware-encoding the output. The first 2 Vegas instances are encoding the first 3.5 hr video to 2 different formats, and the second 2 Vegas instances are encoding the second 3.5 hr video to 2 different formats. This all completes in 1h55m.
A tandem-encode function in Voukoder would drop the render/encode time to about 1 hr. GPU hardware is not an issue; I would throw a second card at it, which would more than keep up. Vegas would have literally half the work to do: 2 renders instead of 4.
So this 'ideal' 1 hr render/encode time is what we're trying to match by using your 'suggestion of exporting first, then encoding'.
To do this 1 hr render/encode in the way you've suggested, let's say we spend 30 min rendering our master file (2.4 TiB written at 1.4 GiB/s on our amazing hard drive), and then we spend another 30 min encoding. Total time 1 hr. Except that Vegas would take 1 hr just to render the master file. And Vegas is not currently using any compression (it's just firing the raw frames to Voukoder), so Vegas render times are as fast as possible already.
But maybe you could reduce the impact of the data size by adding some lightweight fast compression, right? Explain to me how you would manage to double Vegas' render speed . . . while adding file compression. Even if you used a compression format that Voukoder offers, you still would need to DOUBLE Vegas' render speed to make your idea work. As mentioned, Vegas is rendering as fast as possible already.
All that . . . just to match what a tandem encode function in Voukoder could do.
Yep.