Edius V4; PCI Express; missing manuals
BC. What new features can we expect to see in version 4 of Edius? Features that users of V3 would like to see include advanced key-framing for effects; full alpha support for effects and matte; AC3 surround-sound on the timeline and for export; rampable speed changes; multi-cam editing (as Canopus showed at NAB); and nested sequencesHY. All these things will be supported in V4 except for the matte feature
BC. When will V4 of Edius be arriving?
HY. There will be two versions. The first to arrive will be a version for broadcast in February 2006. We will be showing a full line-up of Edius products at next year's NAB. The mass-market version of Edius 4 will arrive in April.
BC. Will Canopus move its NX and SP editing cards over to PCI Express? If so, when?
HY. We'll have a PCI Express board available when there are dual-Xeon motherboards with 2x or better PCI Express slots.
BC. There seems to be few training resources for Edius and there has never been a good paper manual. Do you believe that Canopus does enough to help users of Edius master the program?
HY. The reason why the manuals for Edius are so poor is that development of the program has been so fast. We are working on a tutorial DVD for Edius and a full manual for V3.3, but the price of the manual is undecided.
BC. Are you saying that the manual won't be free?
HY. No, it won't be free.
BC. Edius and other Canopus software doesn't seem to make any use at all of the power available in modern graphics cards. Why is that? And how is the load shared between CPU and Canopus card?
HY. We don't use graphics cards because they are designed for games. The effects from graphics cards are of very poor quality. They're useless for video. They have colour shifts because they work in RGB.
So, Canopus uses its cards to move data to memory and back and for scaling and for in/out.
If you capture HD natively, it's at a resolution of 1920 but if, as we do, you instead capture as an HQ intermediate, it needs 1440, so our card does scaling and the quality is good and it's in real time - and, as I said before, the card handles the sound, too, to guarantee synch.
