editing

EDIUS has a lot of tools / utility shipped with it. Utilities to import P2, XDCAM and others types of content.

One of these utility is called K2 CONNECT.

K2 Connect is a software interface to the Grass Valley Mediaclient or servers. and one of its functionality is to provide FTP access to the content of the server, so multiple EDIUS can download copies of the K2 content to the EDIUS local storage, edit them and send back the edited piece to the Server for playback.

this feature is extremely useful, when stand alone servers are used and that you don't want to use the disk bandwidth to edit in place on the Server and when multiple stand alone editors needs to access the content independently.

Here is how it works, I will talk about the setup at the end of this post.

First launch EDIUS and then in the TOOL menu open the K2 Connect utility:


If you have only one server connected to, just browse the content on the left hand side of the tool, otherwise select your server from the tree in the left window.
to import a clip locally, just double click on a clip. you can do that on multiple clip at the time:


once you double click on a clip the task list monitor window open and the clip start to pop up in your bin. you can then start editing the clip while they are being transferred to you:


once you are done with your editing you can then send back your work to the server for playback. for that you will use the Print to File command from EDIUS and select MXF Exporter form the list of exporters available:



Select your export format and then in the export dialog box type a name for your sequence.
the sequence will then be render on the fly on the destination Server and will be playable before the transfer is finished.



this is it. in just a few clips you have been able to find content on a K2 Server, edit it locally, and send back the sequence as a flat file for playback.

On the setup front, it is pretty straight forward as you will see.
The first time you launch K2 connect you need to setup the K2 Server settings as shown in that screen shot:

the name or the IP adress of the server is needed, the folder that you want to browse the content from, in my screen shot the /DEFAULT folder, and the FTP user name and password, defaulted to mxfmovie for both user name and password.

this is it for the import setup.

for the Export setup, it's very similar but this is done in the MXF exporter dialog box:

This is it. Very simple but very efficient.

Here we go, first entry in my cow blog.... let's make this one about a product that is gaining a lot of momentum in a lot of different places, different workflows...

I am going to talk about GV's EDIUS which is now shipping version 5.1.

EDIUS is not the most powerful editor in terms of editing feature set, although you will find the Multicamera, trimming, effects, color correction and so on like on a lot of good editors out there. it's a little bit like comparing MS's Excel with Apple's Numbers... Numbers is not as powerful as Excel but the average excel user uses only 15% of Excel features, and more advanced users always uses the same features. EDIUS is like that, it does not have all the features,but it has most of the commonly used and it grows rapidly.

But what is making EDIUS apart in this category is not that it is made is Japan, Kobe to be more precise, it's not that it's mother company name doesn't start by an A, it's the speed, efficiently and VERY VERY agile timeline.

For an internal project for NAB I had to use a lot of material coming from different sources, from J2K, AVC HD, DVCPro HD, HDV, photoshop files, PNGs, you name it, you can throw anything to EDIUS, it will Edit it, real time and let you export it in any other formats. I exported my piece of "fine art" in DV100 and AVC-intra and it all look great.

This makes EDIUS a great convenient tool when you don't manage what support and codec your media are going to come in as.
Due to it's very agile timeline and the P2 and XDCAM import tools, a lot of Broadcaster are now starting to use EDIUS as the alternative fast turnaround editing application.

Add to that the New EDIUS XRE Conform engine launch at NAB, you end up with a solution that can take anything out and deport the render/export to a final format for output on a Render farm so you are free to start on a new project before your current one is even finished to be render!

you can always download a free trial of EDIUS here: http://desktop.grassvalley.com/products/EDIUS/index.php go check it out and let me know what you think of it.