Grass Valley Edius Case Study: Avi Sher Editing on Location
Background
Avi Sher is a busy video editor, serving a broad range of clients in Israel, including the advertising industry. When it comes to online videos, he finds he is regularly being challenged with one big demand: "the advertising and creative companies want the video ASAP!"
Speed of delivery is just one part of the challenge. For Sher’s clients, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand pictures. His clients know what they want, they know the business message they want to deliver, and they want to sit with the editor to make sure the video is done right.
Solution
Sher’s solution is to take his edit system with him to his clients so they can look at what he has done, make suggestions, see the changes in real time, and achieve final sign-off...all in one process. Sher’s mobile editing room is Grass Valley™ EDIUS software running on his laptop. But Sher also has a secret weapon that he takes with him to his clients: a Grass Valley ADVC300 Bi-Directional Analog/Digital Video Converter. With the ADVC300, Sher easily can connect a video output from
the editor directly into a client’s or agency’s meeting room television, so if everyone needs to gather around and talk about a cut, it’s easy for everyone to see.
The meeting room LCD television is not the only thing that is easy to connect to the EDIUS editor with the ADVC300. Often, during the course of a project, a client will suggest using some existing footage from their own archive. With EDIUS, it does not matter what format it has been stored in, it can be dropped straight into the timeline and cut into the project. Even old VHS tapes can be converted. It is all part of getting to the best result, quickly, in the meeting room of the satisfied client.
The third item in Sher’s toolkit is another piece of Grass Valley software, ProCoder, which helps him deliver the content in the
right format for the job. When creating a DVD, Sher exports the video in Grass Valley DV AVI from EDIUS. With ProCoder, he can convert the content to MPEG-2 with WAV audio, create the menu, and burn theDVD immediately. If the video has to be published online, he can use ProCoder to convert it to upload to YouTube. ProCoder software has a queue option that allows the user to automate file conversions for different file and wrapper formats. That helps Sher to make the best use of his time with the client and the processor capabilities.
It is clear that the mobile EDIUS editing system—Sher also has a desktop system at his own offices—makes for real productivity gains. But, that would be of limited benefit if the edit facilities themselves were not up to today’s standards.
Having been in the video world since 2002 and the video business since 2006, Sher started with Adobe Premiere and
Avid Composer, then one day a friend recommended that he try EDIUS.
A two-minute demonstration was enough to convince him, and he bought version 2.5 with DVSTORM 2. At the time, it was
basic real-time editing software with a small bank of effects, but it was fast, friendly, and stable with a great range of codecs
and filters. The editing process becomes the work itself, with no more unknown error massages or endless rendering time
for every change in the timeline.
After seven years, Sher is on version 6. It has grown in that time to meet all his creative needs. The software now includes
a lot of effects, new audio tools, and of course it is powerful enough to provide all this functionality on a laptop, so he can
carry a complete editing room with him wherever he goes.
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