In the Studio: Grass Valley EDIUS 5.5

EventDV by Mark Von Lanken

As your editing workflow slow because you are shooting with DSLR or AVCHD cameras? Do you ever feel like your NLE is fighting you instead of working with you? I have heard complaints about instability, crashes, unresponsiveness, rendering, and transcoding, and the list goes on and on. I have been editing on a computer for 11 years, and I have experienced very few of those complaints. In 1999, I was editing with Rex Edit by Canopus. Fast-forward 11 years; I am now editing on EDIUS 5.5 by Grass Valley. EDIUS is the evolution of Rex Edit, so it brought with it two key features from Rex Edit: stability and real-time performance. When making a living with your NLE, those are two very important features to have; after all, time is money

What’s New in 5.5
If you are unfamiliar with EDIUS, hold on. I will give you some background after I address the latest and greatest. If you already know about the power of EDIUS, the big news right now is that Grass Valley recently released EDIUS 5.5, a free upgrade for registered users of EDIUS 5.

The new release includes support for Windows 7. But what’s really exciting about the new release for me is native AVCHD editing in real time. No more transcoding files from the HMC150 or any of the other popular AVCHD cameras. EDIUS 5.5 will even edit the native files from the Canon 5D Mark II, the EOS 7D, and the Rebel T2i. It does all of this without any fancy (expensive) hardware. All you need is a fast, off-the-shelf computer. In addition to the time savings, the files stay small. When I was working with EDIUS 5 and had to transcode AVCHD footage to work with it in the timeline, a 60GB wedding became 250GB–300GB. It’s a good thing hard drives are cheap. read more...