Product Review: Canopus Edius NX
Videography By Oliver Peters 
Canopus has made a name for itself as a manufacturer of high-quality DV codecs. This R&D; effort in advanced codec design has allowed Canopus to expand its products with edit systems, capture cards, the ADVC line of analog-to-DV converters and the ProCoder MPEG-2 encoder. Earlier DV capture cards, such as DV Storm, have morphed themselves into capture cards for HDV and even uncompressed high-definition video. The heart of Canopus' HD systems is the Canopus HQ codec, which is an intermediate postproduction codec that can be used with either HDV or regular HD footage. The HQ codec uses 4:2:2 subsampling and variable bit rate encoding at up to 180Mb/s or more. Sony's HDCAM format uses a proprietary 8-bit compression technology with a bit rate of 135Mb/s (1080i, 1080p24 and 720p). The luminance is downsampled to 1440 and the chroma subsampling follows the 3:1:1 scheme, resulting in 480 samples per line. Canopus' HQ codec keeps the chroma subsampling at 4:2:2 and downsamples the luma resolution to 1440, which means that HQ's luminance resolution is equal to that of HDCAM (1440), and HQ's chroma resolution (720) is higher than those of both DVCPRO HD (640) and HDCAM (480). read more...
Canopus has made a name for itself as a manufacturer of high-quality DV codecs. This R&D; effort in advanced codec design has allowed Canopus to expand its products with edit systems, capture cards, the ADVC line of analog-to-DV converters and the ProCoder MPEG-2 encoder. Earlier DV capture cards, such as DV Storm, have morphed themselves into capture cards for HDV and even uncompressed high-definition video. The heart of Canopus' HD systems is the Canopus HQ codec, which is an intermediate postproduction codec that can be used with either HDV or regular HD footage. The HQ codec uses 4:2:2 subsampling and variable bit rate encoding at up to 180Mb/s or more. Sony's HDCAM format uses a proprietary 8-bit compression technology with a bit rate of 135Mb/s (1080i, 1080p24 and 720p). The luminance is downsampled to 1440 and the chroma subsampling follows the 3:1:1 scheme, resulting in 480 samples per line. Canopus' HQ codec keeps the chroma subsampling at 4:2:2 and downsamples the luma resolution to 1440, which means that HQ's luminance resolution is equal to that of HDCAM (1440), and HQ's chroma resolution (720) is higher than those of both DVCPRO HD (640) and HDCAM (480). read more...
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