Should I go for Edius?

N

Nikolaj

Member
I thought I should ask you experienced people before I invest in something like this... I'm making a feature film on HDV (filmed with a Sony HDR-FX1) and want to be able to edit it as easily as possible, of course.

I want to de-interlace the material (1080i PAL) and color-correct it, and also some simple color-key stuff. I have a Samsung HD television.

What do I do?

Up till now I edited my DV stuff on AVID.

Do I buy Adobe Premiere Pro or do I go for Edius NX wth HD expansion? Pro and cons?

Appreciate any reply, thanks.
 
If you stay with HDV ou have many options:
Premiere
Liquid
Avid
Edius
Vegas

Best is to get demoversions and play with them.
I personally like Liquid. Just trying Edius which is capable as well, but has some Japanese waqys of thinking.
Vegas: you love it you hate it.
Premiere....I don´t lke it, but others never leave home without it.
 
OK. I got Edius for DVCPRO HD. For that it is the best option in terms of power and workflow.

I cannot speak for HDV, but I would suggest that you might download the trial version of Vegas 7. For the money, it is a very robust NLE. It handles sound better than any other, in my opinion (though, I don't think many would disagree with that).

That would be what I would try first. Vegas is a great program for the things that it supports. It is my understanding that HDV editing has improved a lot in version 7. To get Vegas 7 + DVD Archi tect 4 at a very competitive price (700-800) I believe, could be a very good option for you and an HDV workflow.

That being said, EDIUS is a super-powerful NLE that can handle pretty much any format you can throw at it, and you can work with multiple frame rates, formats, and aspect ratios on the same timeline without much hassle, if any, at all.

I would also suggest that you download and test the trial version of EDIUS 4 from www.canopus.com. You do not need the broadcast version to work with HDV (I'm pretty sure). You do not need the hardware to work with any of the formats supported by either 4 or broadcast 4 versions.

You can download and try out all of the different NLE's and find the one that you like the best and that handles the HDV workflow in a manner that is acceptable to you.

Jason
 
Thanks so much to both of you; I will most definitely download the trial version of EDIUS.
Regards,
Nikolaj
 
Nikolaj,
I'm assuming by now, you've already tried the demo versions of the software. I'm not familiar with Vegas, but I've tried the demos for Premier, and Edius. Frankly I think Edius is amazing as far as speed. I was able to edit Real time with 3 streams of video, and 2-3 filters on 2 of the streams. Also the timeline was very responsive. Premier on the other had could not do so much. I downloaded the Aspect HD trial from Cineform because I have the HVX and it uses MXF files (which Premier is not compatible with. Edius Broadcast is, and it handles it beautifully). Supposedly the Cineform plugin would improve real time editing, but it has very limited filters in Real time and it wasn't nearly as responsive as Edius. But Edius doesn't have as many plug-ins as Premier, and its color correction is still primitive as well as its keyframing of effects. So far I'm still not sure which one to get. Let me know which one you decide on and why?
 
No, he's not. He's just a customer like the rest of you (and me, once upon a time).

Honestly, we (the former Canopus side of things) don't sponsor folks very often, especially not for websites and such. We're lucky to have enthusiastic users who do it on their own.

Brandon
 
Yeah Nikolaj,
I have to be honest. I've had a canopus DVstorm from way back, and they were editing real time with 4-5 streams and tons of filters when everyone else was just wishing they could do 1 real time with 1 filter on it. The demo of Edius was amazing. I just wish they had color correction in the likes of Combustion (even if it only allowed you 1 stream w/ color correction) and they also need better Keyframing capabilities for the effects. Some of their effects are keyframable, but some are not.
From my experience Canopus is a great company turning out real solid solutions. Its a shame they have not taken more of the market and that there aren't many addon plugins for it.
Keep up the good work Canopus.
 
I just have to add that I am not quite sure what the beef is with edius' color correction. It seems to be quite adequate to me, and from what I understand significantly improved from prior versions. I think the problem is, that white balance isn't just white balance. There are a nice little host of color correction features within white balance alone. I am could be wrong. I don't have much to compare it to, but I seem to think that the color correction on Edius is a little under rated.

Jason
 
Hi Jason,
Don't get me wrong. Their color correction has gotten much better with edius than with their earlier software. And I must admit that I am not a color correcting expert, and perhaps I am wrong and haven't really evaluated the software properly. Here are the things I thought were missing and please correct me if I am wrong: (I'm here to learn and I've left my ego a long time ago)
*I could not find a gamma control. Just a brightness control.
*I could not find a way to affect the shadows independently from the midtones and from the highlights.
*some of the settings have a very strong effect even when you move it up just one notch.

I think that's it.
 
Hello there.
Im the guy who put that review together and no I don't work for Canopus.
Thanks for taking time to check it out.

I'm sitting here editing our new underwater DVD with Edius 4 shot with our HDV camera's and just have to say again that the CC works great with the Canopus HQ codec. You have many options and you can even keyframe it.

The Chrominace filter has been used in shots where we blued up the water and then enhanced the main subject. Took abit of playing / learning but the test m2t and DVD's encodes we did came out great. Speed encoder is very good.

It certainly is doing a better job with our material than what Premiere Pro and Aspect HD did, even my partner Kelly can see the difference.

We also cut up a 5 mini DV piece for ABC 2 AUS TV (VIDEO LIVES) and as we had some material already in the computer as 1440/1080 Canopus HQ, we sucked in the extra min 16.9 DV footage and just edited it all on a 1440/1080 timeline. Rendered out a mini DV file and firewired it back to the camera. Pretty cool I thought.

We also gave it a workout mixing audio tracks and sucking in the naration straight in the timeline which worked very well.

All in all we are very hapy with it and look forward to a Core2 Quad CPU abit later on down the track.

Cheers
Paul Wags
www.hdvunderwater.com
 
Thanks for that wags. Siniarch... I definitely wouldn't be one to correct you, I am just learning Edius myself. And, when it comes to cc, I am pretty much a total beginner. Like I said, I really can't compare it to other nle's cc capabilities, because I have never used cc extensively before.
I think, if you haven't already explored it, that you might check out the white balance options though. I found there are quite a few things I could do with the overall look of my footage, both subtle and extreme. I think some of the capabilites of Edius' CC get lost in the white balance tool.
I have heard differing opinions on the CC abilities of Edius, and think it would be great for someone to chime in and really let everyone know just what Edius can (or doesn't) do in the CC realm. Maybe our Canopus expert Brandon, or someone else with their expertise and solid background with various NLE's like Barry can chime in on this and put this baby to rest once and for all.
CC seems to be something that gives a lot of people reservations about whether or not to go with Edius, so I think it would be worthwile. The other reservation people seem to have about Edius, is its lack of "robust-ness" in comparison to other NLE's. That I can agree with. On, the other hand, I have found the power, and compatibility that Edius offers to be well worth the trade off.

Jason
 
Guys thought I would post this.
Here are two screen grabs of before and after using the Chrominace filter and then applying CC to certain areas from within that filter.

As Shot with the FX1
wb1.jpg


After.... We blued up the water then we took some of the red out from the foreground. Cool hey.....

wb.jpg
 
Hi siniarch,

siniarch said:
*I could not find a gamma control. Just a brightness control.
Click to expand...
The closest thing to gamma (and it gets pretty close) is the Y graph of the YUV curve filter.
siniarch said:
*I could not find a way to affect the shadows independently from the midtones and from the highlights.
Click to expand...
White Balance will do this.
Another way to approach this is to use the Chrominance filter and the Luma limiter (vertical bar to the right of the color map in non-picker mode) to restrict changes to just certain luma levels. You can also set blending (the yellow line, versus the red line) so it's not so abrupt between different adjustments.
Since you can use multiple Chrominance filters, you can make adjustments to different colors and/or levels semi-independently (it's a hierarchy, so if you "push" something from 5 to 10, then the next filter adjusts 10-20, then that range will get double-filtered).
siniarch said:
*some of the settings have a very strong effect even when you move it up just one notch.
Click to expand...
Depends on the setting. The granularity of the sliders varies a lot. I use the numeric entries whenever possible.

Brandon
 
Thanks brandon. seems like a weird workaround (not intuitive) but very workable. I am a very big fan of canopus, mainly because they seem like the underdog to me. But they have so much power under their hood. I just wish they would clean some of these things up (mainly interface issues) so they could compete with the big boys. So people wouldn't have to dig deep to find these settings and they were more standardized. I could be wrong, but it just feels like canopus has much more clean code than adobe premier.
 
Yeah, the whole White Balance is much more than White Balance thing has been a thorn in our side since White Balance got upgraded.

You don't have to do it the Chrominance way, but I like the extreme level of control. I'm a "nuts and bolts" kind of guy, despite my attempt to simplify.

:) Remember that you can save custom filter presets, so once you get something that works, it's easy to make variations of it.

Brandon
 
Thanks Brandon,

i agree that we need some tutorials on the CC, i got smashed a little over in canopus forum when i said i dont think that the edius CC is good....i was looking on it from my after effects point of view(which is definitly a different workflow), but i probably was wrong about the abilitys that edius has, maybe in some "uncommon" ways...so would be great if someone could support us "edius-CC-ignorants" with some proper knowledge, cause i definitly go for edius 4 broadcast and the NX for my HVX footage, and the more i can do directly to my footage in Edius, less i have to convert to a canopus HQ and do in After effects...!

So roll for that Brandon..!
 
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