Frank Gothmann
Forum Replies Created
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[Gary Bettan] “Grass Valley just announced Edius 6.5 and it will include broad 3rd party hardware and plug-in support. “
According to some official posts at the GV forums their HQ and HQX codecs will indeed become cross platform, encode/decode on both and it does stereoscopic. That’s a big one for me. Very much looking forward to hearing more details about the next version as NAB comes closer.
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[Walter Soyka] “While FCPX is less than a year old, Apple has been in the NLE market for 13 years. While some say it’s unreasonable to expect too much from a new product, others reasonably ask why we should lower our expectations of a leading developer with over a decade’s experience in the market.”
Totally agree. I never understood the argument that it’s a 1.0 release and it took years for classic FCP to mature. If a new car model comes out nobody compares it with the first model from 15 years ago but with the one the came before it. And that applies to all aspects of life, it should also be valid for software. Certainly when its intended for usage in an environment where people make money with it and deadlines are tight.
Also, frankly, as a paying customer, I don’t care wether its a rewrite or a 1.0 or whatever. It has to work and do what it is supposed to do.
The missing features is one thing, the sluggishness and stability issues are a different story altogether.
It may be great for lots of people in its current state, it isn’t for many others. Given the general noise and feedback one has to wonder wether it was worth all that. After all, it’s not exactly as if Apple needs money so badly they had to go for an early launch, or as if FCPX was a missing link in their soft- and hardware portfolio that made things come together. If anything, it was the opposite. So… WHY?
Most of this has nothing to do with magnetic TL vs. tracks etc. etc.; all that would have been debatable in an entirely different context if the launch/transition had been handled in a reasonable/timely manner.
Keep classic on sale, anounce X as a beta, give people a roadmap, communicate and listen.
If that’s not Apple’s way of doing things, well.. then up yours Cupertino. -
[Steve Connor] “From the reports I’ve read it seems like a great NLE, why hasn’t it achieved broader acceptance in the industry?”
Well, I’ll pick my own nose here: because for years and years I didn’t really look beyond FCP and the Mac; happily repeating the mantra of crash prone Windows, Blu-screen of death etc. etc. Until I had to use Windows for jobs I couldn’t do on a Mac, and then X came along. It just seriously changed my outlook and gave way to a ton of possibilities.
I just take this as an opportunity to really evaluate things left right and forth. Some more, also for paid work, some just for fun. Most of the stuff is available as a trial so there is no reason to play around with it. And when there is a liking and I feel it suits my workflow in better ways than other apps I explore it deeper.
Next week or so I want to install Edius on one of my production machines and give is a thorough try because it’s seems pretty perfect for some of the things I have to do on a daily basis. -
[Michael Gissing] ” I am trying to capitalise on overpriced hardware already purchased. Edius might be worth a trial but I have to have proper monitoring and output to HDCam & digi beta.”
Same for me, totally agree with you. If there was full-on 3rd party io support plus if they made their own codec cross platform it would be extremely interesting. It’s still a 32bit only app so it will also be interesting to see if the next rev will move it to 64bit. I am keeping an eye on that one, NAB could bring some interesting new alternatives. Nevertheless, if you have a windows installation I’d recommend to check out the trial and just play around with it – it was just plain, pure fun for me regarding speed and responsiveness.
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[Michael Gissing] “I saw the promotions recently and had a look at the software features online. I searched for a reference to using external cards like Kona for broadcast accurate monitoring and saw nothing so lost interest in Edius. Also I need a tool that can import formats like XML and AAF plus round tripping to a grading program (da Vinci is now taking over from Color for me).
Does anyone know if it supports export and import of any standards and if it has proper output via a Kona?
“Edius outputs AAF and edl, also reads FCP XML V.5 (haven’t tried that but read it does). As far as hardware support, the situation is a bit like Avid MC pre 6, ie. Grass Valley have their own IO hardware to go with Edius (Storm 3G would be the Kona equivalent, It was in the machine I tired. Output is super smooth as we are used to via FCP.). However, there is one BM card that works with Edius at the moment and rumors have it they might open up more in the future. Current V.6 is more than a year old so there will be a big release this year (the 3D capable version of Edius is in beta and that Beta will expire around NAB so…). Not sure though, GV is a hardware company mainly so they want to move their own IO boards. It’s certainly an app to look at very closely. Again, I was very impressed with the UI and the speed. It’s pretty much like FCP on PC, just much faster and native.
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Actually not quite true, there is an Edius forum here on the cow
https://forums.creativecow.net/edius
However, it’s not the most frequented forum around here. The forum at Grass Valley itself is very informative.About Edius itself, I had the chance of playing around with it at a friends who swears by it and I was extremely impressed. I love the UI and the concept. Coming from FCP, I felt instantly 100 per cent at home and I mean no issues at all.
It is indeed freakin’ fast, extremely stable and its realtime capabilities are brutal. I did some PIP tests with AVCHD to test something that taxes the machine and I stopped at 10 streams, no dropped frames, and it doesn’t even use CUDA.
It brings its own intermediate codec, Canopus HQX. It uses the avi wrapper, not Quicktime based, redering into it is the fastest codec I have seen anywhere. It smokes DnxHD, Prores and Cineform in terms of performance bigtime. I can’t remember how fast it was but it was about 3-4x times faster than exporting to a DnxHD QT.
I might do some speed comparisons and RT tests with some of the big NLEs when I have the time one day. I wouldn’t be surprised if Edius beats them all to be honest. -
I agree that it’s a welcome, speedy option for smaller devices and portables. The main problem I have at this stage is that there is little information out there as to compatibility, chaining order and how devices actually influence each other and eat bandwith. So, yeah, I’d also be a bit cautious. There is not enough hardware and real world usage reports out there at the moment – and there might be a reason for it.
Data flow is never constant if you have multiple devices connected and/or only one controller in the machine. Your footage may come from one but also from two raid arrays or a SAN. How many streams, how many audio channels, same goes for video io (single link or dual link sdi, how many audio channels), how many displays, Raid plus a magma box etc. etc.
If it’s just one raid you have connected all is dandy but at a certain point, something’s gotta give and depending on your usage and connected hardware that bottleneck may become noticable during critical work or during a playout. And it’s hard to predict and to calculate. There have been reports where video io, raid and two monitors brought it down already.
On another note: why not get a beefy small Raid box that connects via SAS? It’s cheaper then a TB raid and you have guaranteed bandwith, regardless of other cards and peripherals, that goes way beyond what a TB raid would provide. -
I guess it boils down to X being heavily optimized for Open CL and performs better there while CPU is a supporting but not the main factor. You know, smaller, lighter, mobile devices. That plus immature code given that AV Foundation is, just like X itself, in its infancy.
I am not sure the whole 32 vs 64 bit thing comes that much into play here. The other day I was playing around at a friend’s place with Edius 6 which, of all the bigger NLEs out there that are still in development, is still 32 bit only and the performance of that thing in terms of RT and render speed even with AVCHD is simply mind-boggeling without any CUDA or Open CL help at all.
I guess a lot is related to how good the engineering behind it all is. -
It’s MC6, but the max number of channels I seem to be able to output is eight with a non-referenced file.
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[Andy Neil] “Wow.”
Peace, guys. It’s just a piece of software.