Edius 4

CANOPUS EDIUS 4 REVIEW

Canopus Edius 4

I recall back in 2000, I had bought a two card set that enabled me to edit DV in real time with my Pentium 500, using about 250 megs of ram. The setup gave me real time effects and much more and I remember thinking 'wow this is great!'.

A couple of years later I downloaded Adobe's Premiere Pro to trial, as I had upgraded to a two GIG PC and it seemed to edit DV in real time without the need for my old two card set.

Edius 4 & The Amphibico Phenom

Premiere Pro became my preferred program for editing my underwater DV material, and I was amazed by the fact that I could edit in real time just by using a software NLE. In about 2003 I came across Edius for the first time, and although I remember it cut up DV rather well, did not look into it any further as I was familiar with Premiere Pro and impressed with what I could already achieve.

In 2005 HDV was released. I one of the first in Australia to take an FX1 HDV camera underwater. I was also a beta tester for Adobe's new plugin for Premiere Pro to enable it to edit HDV. HDV is 1440/1080/50i compressed to a MPEG 2 format in real time @25mbps and dumped to a normal cheap mini DV tape.

Big Old Floppy Whale Shark

Although this high resolution was being compressed considerably to fit onto DV tapes, it still gave a fantastic image and those that watched HDV on a full resolution screen would be hooked. Goodbye DV!

Another company called Cineform also made a plugin for Premiere Pro called 'Aspect HD'. As the HDV MPEG 2 was firewired from the HDV camera, it converted it to a special AVI format to allow it be be edited a lot easier by computers. MPEG 2 is very difficult to edit on its own due to the long gobs. Once the MPEG 2 was converted to Cineform's AVI, you could edit in real time, similar to normal DV now days. My 3 GIG PC could not keep up when converting on the fly, so it took about 25% more time to finish the conversion after I had sucked the material in.

Yep That's A Great White Biting Our Rib

At first I was impressed with this method of editing HDV, but after a while began to realize that when adding colour correction, slow motion or zooming in slightly on my underwater footage, it did not look to good. I was told that I needed to buy Prospect HD and edit in '10' bit to get better results. For normal 'up-top' footage you could not easily pick out any drop in quality, but you certainly could on underwater footage. Just by adding some colour correction and I would get banding in some scenes. The m2t encoded files did not look the best either, and I seemed to be able to make better quality ones with Main Concept Pro's product.
		HDV Is Perfect For Underwater Video

I had a demo copy of a program called Edius 3 that I had downloaded a while back and never got around to testing on HDV material, due to my graphics card not being powerfully enough. Eventually the day came where I updated my computer and found I had 128 megs of graphics power so away I went and loaded it up. After a reboot I opened up this strange looking NLE program form Japan and started to have a play. First I sucked in normal m2t files and found it could edit them, but was abit clunky due to it being MPEG 2. Then I started reading about this Canopus HQ thing and soon realized it did what Cineforms Aspect HD plugin does for Premiere Pro. So I began testing side by side on the same underwater scene's with Aspect HD AVI's and the Canopus HQ codec, adding colour correction and zooming in slightly etc. I then then encoded out the clips to m2t files and then watched them at full screen. Well I was impressed- Goodbye Aspect HD and hello Canopus HQ! What a great codec, AND it was turning the camera's m2t footage into the Canopus HQ codec on the fly in real time. If I had 60mins to suck in, that's how long it took and on my 3 GIG PC. Converting to Cineforms AVI took about 25% more time. Yep, I was hooked!

After a few days, I discovered there was a new version out so I went to the Canopus website and downloaded the 30 day Version 4 to try out. Wow, now I had things like variable slow motion and colour correction in real time and more. So impressed was I at that Canopus HQ codec, that I sent Thomsongrassvalley an email here in Australia, and not only did they reply to the email, they decided to send over a full version of Edius 4 to test out for them with our underwater footage. Soon it arrived in its nice little box and inside was some manuals and 5 CD's- Edius 4, Title Motion, PDF Manuals, HD Video Samples and a Bonus CD with a few extra programs on it, which I will cover. Oh yes, and I also received a very cute little dongle in my package!

Here's What You Get

Installation was a breeze. Load up Edius 4, reboot then put the little USB dongle in. Place CD in and load up the Title Motion. Reboot then pop in the Bonus CD and install MPEGcapture, Adorage effects and Sound Soft. Following these steps, I went to the Canopus web site and downloaded the latest updates so I had Version 4.03. I also downloaded Heroglyph's www.heroglyph.com time limit demo and installed that. Now you are probably wondering who we are. We are based on the Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia and do a lot of underwater filming here with much of our work appearing on TV doco's and programs around the world. We also have also recently provided two reviews on underwater housings made by a Canadian company called www.Amphibico.com
			Cute Little Dongle
			What's a dongle? A dongle is like a physical software unlocking key. Although the software key can be transferred to the computer... keep your dongle somewhere safe so you don't loose it......

Here is the links to underwater housing reviews and our web site
www.hdvunderwater.com
www./hdvunderwater.com/review.html
www./hdvunderwater.com/EVO%20review.html
Wags & Kelly 2006



The 3 Amphibico's