X – It isn't just for Apple anymore – Edius update

[Greg Janza]

Out of sheer curiosity, what’s the market for Edius X? I ask partly because in 25 years of working in this business I’ve never come across anyone who’s ever used Edius.

[Gerry Fraiberg]

I don’t know of anyone using it. In the small market where I am it’s Resolve, Premiere, Avid and FCPX. I posted the news release somewhat tongue in cheek in that they’re naming it “Edius X”.

[Tim Wilson]

Back in the day, we had a gigantic Edius community. The parent company was Canopus, pronounced “Can O’ Pus” by its customers after some particularly egregious behavior whose specifics I can’t recall.

It was a ridiculously powerful system, packed with all kinds of cool features, including maybe the first implementation of real-time HD that I remember seeing, but it was swamped by cool features coming out of a rising FCP, the introduction of Premiere Pro, an ascendent Media Composer whose business more than doubled between 2003-2005, and doubled again from 2005-2007 (including a thriving Pinnacle Liquid that gut sucked into Avid’s maw), all while Vegas was continuing its stampede as it moved from Sonic Foundry to Sony.

Grass Valley was a hardcore, old-line hardware company with no software to speak of, so they saw the floundering Edius, and in 2005, picked it up to be the software front end for Grass Valley systems, not just switchers, but all the other stuff in a newsroom or truck that needed software to drive it (broadcast graphics as another example).

And hey, it’s not like Canopus and Edius were the only companies to crash into the rocks in the early aughts. Media 100 was still going as a ghost of its former greatness when Boris scooped it up to take care of folks who had outstanding service contracts. Boris keeps developing it, it’s still packed with state of the art features, but really, most Media 100 folks were early adopters of FCP. Plenty of reasons for some diehards to keep using it, but I’m not sure why anybody would have started using M100 by the time the century turned.

Matrox is another company that used to thrive in these parts — Matrox Digisuite (basically Premiere on steroids on crank, in a good way) was one of the most compelling systems in the world with a huge following at the beginning of the century, but right about this same mid-aughts era, Matrox decamped for the world whose tradeshow summit is INFOCOMM, and is barely around the mainstream broadcast world anymore.

So if you’re not using Grass Valley hardware, I’m not sure you even CAN use Edius anymore. Maybe? But hey, I’m sure that there’s someone still using it. It’s just that COWs have never fed much in the grassy valley so I’d be shocked if there were any former Canopus folks in these parts.

But no kidding, in the early days of the COW, Edius was easily the equal of FCP, Vegas, and a good handful of others. BACK THEN. Sometimes 20 years ago feels like forever, and other times, not so long ago at all…..but even for somebody as old as me, it more often feels like a long time ago.

And yes, if you’re doing the math, that means that Creative COW is coming up on its 20th anniversary next April, with roots going back to 1995. Edius is hardly the craziest story we’ve got to tell.