Grass Valley (Belden) EDIUS Pro/Elite7
Grass Valley (Belden) EDIUS Pro/Elite7
(Windows 7 [64-bit])Street price: $700
As Apollo 8 sailed around the Moon in the tumultuous year of 1968, a small California company brought to market its first video switcher. And for the next three decades, Grass Valley more or less dominated the workflow of weaving linear video streams, whether live, off tape, from film-chains or in combination.
As that icy jerk Grand Moff Tarkin orders the destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star’s correlated-beam weapon, it is the T-handle and color-lit buttons upon the dusty deck of a Grass Valley 1600 “vision mixer” that is propped up to do the killing.
As Grass Valley grew in California, another small company named Canopus launched in Kobe, Japan in 1983. It was an early maker of video cards and soon saw the need for simple editing software to go with them.
Video editing passed through a bridge period during the 1990s; not yet non-linear, but not quite offline. And Grass Valley was there. We Cro-Magnons (Homo editus) would ingest low-res versions of clips into Avids or other platforms to make our cut decisions and plan effects. But all they spit out was an Edit Decision List (EDL), to be brought into a tape-based edit suite and “conformed.” Wipes, picture insets, composites, graphics and fonts were brought to the party through the mix effects amplifiers of Grass (and other) boards.
In 2002, Grass Valley Group was bought by Thomson Multimedia of France (later to be renamed Technicolor); in 2005 Thomson acquired Canopus, bringing a non-linear editor to the grand Grass hardware heritage. And EDIUS was born.
It is at home in broadcast and high-end post-production environments. When integrated with Grass Valley’s STRATUS media management tools, EDIUS probably offers the fastest inter-format editing solution around.
There have never been more different video formats than right now. EDIUS excels at scaling, sizing and cropping. This includes working at 4K. When they say “Edit Anything,” they mean it.
The simplicity of the interface is another plus for EDIUS. In a duel between EDIUS and Lightworks for which boasts the least complicated pro-level NLE, it’d be hard to pick a winner. Its ergonomics are intuitive.
Similarly, EDIUS has one of the most straightforward multi-cam interfaces around, likely another outflow of the Grass Valley switcher birthright. But it takes things literally. If you try to edit very high-res multi-cam (say, four or five 4K sources), EDIUS will grind slower than Treebeard the Ent on Thorazine on all but the most hot-rodded hardware. The workaround is to ask EDIUS to build proxy clips—which will drop frames—and go have lunch while it does them. But don’t make it a liquid lunch because when you come back, EDIUS will be ready to cut cameras as quick as you want. Just be sure to check that the proxy parade has fully passed in the Background Jobs pane.
Ironically, in light of the Canopus DNA as a video card maker, EDIUS is building its bridge to the future by friending external hardware makers: Matrox (long a card-resident graphics slinger), Blackmagic Design (the Han Solo of the video business) and, just recently, AJA (ironically located in Grass Valley, CA).
EDIUS still retains flavors of the linear and hardware workflows of the past. Not at all a bad thing. For example, today’s EDIUS can still pass an EDL around, notably to Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve color grader. But its vibe can seem stodgy to those born on the right side of the digital divide.
Stepping up from EDIUS Pro to Elite yields only a few more tricks, and they are very specific to the professional broadcast setting. You can pass and edit multiplexed (encoded) Dolby AC3 audio and you can network via STRATUS for workflow and play-out to air.
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