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.
