Product Reviews

Premiere has long basked in the glow of being the first mainstream, non-linear video-editing application for the PC. But its supremacy has been under attack of late. First, its longstanding bundle relationship with Pinnacle ended, as the latter switched to the Edition software it acquired with the purchase of Fast. Now Canopus, although still maintaining Premiere support, has taken the Edius software it launched just a year ago into the mainstream. With the addition of OHCI FireWire support, Edius 2 no longer requires proprietary Canopus hardware to function, opening up the range of potential host systems to anything with a standard IEEE-1394 port - including notebooks.

Edius 2 doesn't look markedly different to its predecessors, as most of the changes are under the hood. As such, it remains easiest to use with two monitors, as the many palettes can become unruly when squeezed onto a single screen. Unfortunately, though, despite the addition of standard FireWire, the capture tools haven't been updated. We found that the options to break captured video automatically into separate clips along time and date stamp breaks didn't work, leaving us manually marking in and out points, then batch capturing them automatically. It's the same system as Premiere, but compared to Matrox Media Tools' seamless single-pass automatic capture, it's rather laborious.

Other than OHCI support, the other major news with Edius 2 is the comprehensive MPEG support. With the appropriate Canopus hardware - currently just the standalone MPEGPro, MVR-D2200 and Amber lines - MPEG can be captured directly into Edius. The fact that the DVStorm isn't on this list is likely to annoy its existing users, as Matrox's RT.X100 has had MPEG-2 capture from within Premiere for some time. However, Canopus's standalone MPEG adaptors can also capture MPEG-1, which Matrox's RT.X100 can't.

After capture, the new MPEG support becomes considerably more interesting. Edius can edit MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 on the timeline. Not only that, it can combine the two simultaneously alongside DV as well. And all of these can be mixed in real-time. This is a truly unique feature, and one that will have anyone who does a lot of DVD authoring salivating. Rounding it all off, Edius can output all manner of MPEG formats via the new ProCoder Express plug-in.

In the past, Canopus has concentrated on the more mundane side of editing

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- putting together narrative sequences with only minimal effects. Edius was its first step in a more flexible direction, aside from the driver and effects plug-in support for Premiere. Edius can have unlimited audio and video layers, while transitions can be placed on any track, as with Premiere.

Edius doesn't add anything major on the effects front. The range of effects includes the usual suspects, such as colourisation, embossing, and Canopus's much-lauded Old Movie filter. Chroma and luma keying are available too, plus both 2D and fully configurable 3D picture-in-picture. With the addition of Canopus's Xplode for Edius 3D transitions, there are sufficient effects options for most editors. However, there are a few quirks. Transitions and keys can't be applied simultaneously to the same clip, and not all effects can be keyframed - colourisation being the most annoying omission.

Titling is one area where Edius has improved considerably with version 2. Instead of the Inscriber TitleExpress on the previous version of Edius, the full TitleMotion Pro 4.3 is bundled. This superb titler not only offers comprehensive formatting capabilities, including text along a path plus vector shape tools, but also contains a very powerful animation engine. Text can be animated line by line in very sophisticated ways. Best of all, Edius will render these animations in real-time for short durations, although Canopus also supplies its own title animation effects.

Edius' most impressive feature is just how much it can mix in real-time. On our dual Athlon MP 2400+ test rig, we found we could easily combine three streams of DV with more than one effect applied to each stream. Edius also contains Canopus' caching technology. During less processor-intensive sections, rendering races ahead and future frames are buffered into memory. When a section is reached that exceeds CPU capabilities, this buffer will allow real-time playback to continue for a few seconds - enough for a complex transition. Unfortunately, in OHCI mode Edius only allows a 32-frame buffer. Users of proprietary Canopus hardware get the option to increase this considerably in a system with plenty of RAM.

Another big plus is that, unlike Pinnacle Liquid Edition, even OHCI users get real-time DV output from the timeline. Edius will also render to DV files, plus AVIs and still-image sequences. Further output options are added via the bundled ProCoder Express, including MPEG-1 and 2; VOB files ready to burn to DVD without authoring software; streaming Windows Media, QuickTime and Real Media; and even DivX. A full Pro version of the latter codec is included. ProCoder can even transcode between PAL and NTSC formats, and on DVStorm systems with MPEG encoding hardware, rendering is accelerated.

In just a year, Edius has come from nowhere to take its place as a viable Premiere competitor. It may not have Adobe's range of effects, but its real-time capabilities are exceptional, and its MPEG editing unique.