Edius NEO 2.5 : HD Can't Be As Easy As It Looks?

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Denniscasey

Well-known member
I am about to purchase Panasonic AG-HMC40 and watched the promotional video on the Panasonic site for Edius NEO 2.5 which is bundled with this camera. Right now I edit tape based standard definition video (from Sony VX2000) on Avid/Pinnacle Liquid 7. Now want to upgrade to HD and for various reasons I have upgraded to Avid Media Composer 5 (but have not yet learned to use it).

Over last few days I have learned quite a bit about the complexity of Panasonic AVCHD when attempts are made to use in Media Composer (due to lack of AVCHD support) and am still confused about all the transcoding options to use it efficiently in MC5 (despite help I have had from various forum members). So, I wonder if Edius 2.5 would be an intermediate step I could take to at least get video off the SD cards, basic editing and burned to BluRay?

The promotional Panasonic/Grass Valley NEO 2.5 video made it look relatively easy (sort of the Avid Liquid workflow I use with standard def), but I have learned things are never as easy as promos show. Would video out of NEO 2.5 onto BluRay retain the quality recorded by the camera (assume camera operator did a good job)? I know MC5 and NEO 2.5 are intended for very different audiences, so don't mean to draw comparisons between the two, just wonder if I would get "lossless" transfer from camera through NEO 2.5 to BluRay?
 
Premiere Pro, Edius, Vegas and most other NLE systems will edit native AVCHD provided you have a quad core CPU.
 
I use Edius 2.5 to edit my GH1 video and haven't noticed any quality issues. I should note that I'm running the hack with 24p mode -- there are some issues with the pulldown removal from the standard 60i output. This shouldn't impact you with your HMC40 video.

I'm not using this in a professional endeavor so I'm probably not as critical as some of the people on this forum. I came from Pinnacle Studio and found Edius fairly easy to pick up and run with it. I've never used Liquid so I don't know how that might compare.

I don't think you can download the trial for 2.5 anymore, but you should be able to download the 3.0 trial and see if you like the results. 3.0 has some new features, but I understand the interface and rendered results should be very similar.

I hope this helps.
 
Thank you for sharing your experience. On the promo video I watched Edius transcodes AVCHD to their proprietary codec (Canopus HD??) for faster editing in their software just as it seems Avid MC5 wants you to get to their proprietary codec (DNxHD) for faster editing in their software. I also note the speed of transcoding shown in Panasonic/Edius promo requires using Edius extra cost (but not unreasonable) hardware Firecoder Blu or something. It just appears Edius and the other NLE's medeamajic mentions make it easier to do this transcoding within the NLE itself. Dennis
 
I don't do any pre-transcoding of the AVCHD files before I use them with Edius. With a fast enough processor, Edius will be able to edit in real-time in most cases. Sometimes, especially with effects and transitions, the preview window will slow down and the image becomes choppy. When this happens, you can transcode to Canopus from within the timeline by right-clicking on the affected clip and choosing the Render option. This will create a cached copy of the transcoded clip and use that during editing. It's virtually transparent to the editing process. If you make further changes to the clip, Edius will throw away the cached copy and you can re-render it as required.
 
Thank you Phil--I am trying to get up to speed in world of shooting and editing HD--it's looking like I better upgrade technology more frequently than my standard 6 to 8 year cycle to stay more current (but at hobbyist level hard to justify spending too much too often).
 
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