Editing with Canopus Edius
The next piece of Windows editing software we tried was Canopus’s Edius 3.1 Pro. This runs on any OHCI-standard FireWire port and provided us with quite a polished experience – better than anything else we tried, in fact.First, it could import and edit the files we’d captured with Ulead. Better, it could also capture HDV, and could do so to two formats - MPEG-2 and Canopus’s own HQ AVI, requiring use of Canopus’s MPEG Capture applet, rather than the standard capture interface used for DV.
Our best HDV editing experience by far came from Canopus’s software package Edius Pro 3.1,with up to three streams of HDV mixed in real time for short sequences and direct
capture support. But the company’s hardware/software solution is even better
Canopus HQ format uses a proprietary Codec with a variety of quality levels on offer, and it’s specifically designed to produce AVIs files streamlined for editing within Edius – they have a linear, frame-by-frame structure like DV, not the complex but space-saving, long-GOP (group of pictures) arrangement of MPEG-2. There’s no batch capture as yet, but Canopus claims this will be introduced to the MPEG Capture applet soon (weeks, not months), adding considerable to Edius capability.
We captured footage in the Canopus HQ AVI format at standard quality settings using MPEG Capture. These settings equate to a data rate of around 66Mbits/sec for the video (that’s 8.25MByte/sec and about 2.3x the on-disc data rate of DV).
Dropping our HQ AVI files onto Edius’s timeline, we were able to preview and scrub very responsively, even with effects such as white balance applied. We also tried mixing multiple streams.
On our main test system – with dual Xeon CPUs running at 3.06GHz - two streams of HDV with a 3D picture-in-picture played back for nine seconds in real time but three streams only lasted five seconds. In each case we were using the software’s real-time buffer which, in V3.1, can be adjusted to a maximum of 96 frames, compared with Edius 2’s fixed 32-frame buffer – a welcome improvement, whether editing HDV or DV.
Real-time playback lasted 20 seconds when we tried two streams – the second having a chroma key - but adding a third stream using 2D picture-in-picture reduced this to nine seconds. None of this is up to what you’d expect with editing DV but was impressive relative to what the other programs could do with HDV.
We couldn’t export back to tape with the OHCI software-only version of Edius Pro 3.1, though this is possible with the hardware-assisted Edius NX for HDV and, hopefully will be added at some time to the software-only version, though no promises have been heard.
