Over the last several years I have come to understand all the quirks of editing with Premiere. While at NAB this year I was impressed with all the Edius systems I saw, so I thought I'd download the demo and give it a try.

I opened some DV test footage and I was happy with the way that Edius worked. The interface was nice, and it was easy to start editing a program without spending hours going through tutorials. I'm interested in purchasing another edit system and I might make it an Edius.

So one of my questions is, what comes with an Edius? Is Procoder express comparable to the Adobe Media Encoder? Can it make Blu-Ray discs directly from the timeline? Is there an included DVD authoring program?

I know enough to say that I would need the Edius broadcast, but where I'm confused is the hardware. I will mostly be cutting DV, HDV, and XDCAM EX footage. Do I need hardware to do this? If so could I use third party hardware (Blackmagic or AJA)? If I cannot use third party hardware, what Grass Valley hardware should I get? Most of the content will either be delivered on Blu-Ray or to the web, so I will not need any sophisticated capture hardware for decks. The only thing I would need the hardware to do would be to preview to an HD monitor.

Finally, can Edius be used on 64-bit operating systems? If not, is this feature planned for future releases?

Thanks to all in advance.

Hi Devin,

The hardware does give you real time out. I have an SP board and Broadcast, as 4.60 will natively umport the EX files via the Sony software without conversion, but I'm sure the NX boards will do you.

Suggest you go to the forums at Grass Valley as you can access the Bluray presets for Procoder in that forum, and ask all your Edius questions in the Edius forum.

http://ediusforum.grassvalley.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=6

for any extra help. They're a good bunch there.

Cheers Vaughan

i have an old storm card which i use with edius. I edit HD with it. I use the storm card to preview color correction on a CRT TV. Export to HD

You can however use the edius NX system since thats the current board designed for HD.

I suggest you only use windows XP with service pack 2 or 1 since Vista is evil.

I will mostly be cutting DV, HDV, and XDCAM EX footage. Do I need hardware to do this? ...The only thing I would need the hardware to do would be to preview to an HD monitor.

The main purpose of the Edius hardware is to provide real-time HD output from the timeline (plus various inputs), so in that sense you would need it. But you could just connect two high-res monitors to a computer with a fast video card and preview on one of the monitors without the Edius hardware, depending on how picky you are about having a calibrated monitor. Hope that helps.

Just to clarify,

for REALTIME playback/preview in HDV ie1440x1080 or 19202x1080 to a monitor, including any and all effects/compositing/transitions/mulitple tracks/various levels of opacity etc

does Edius 4.x require hardware acceleration eg the NX (i assume the DVStorm will only play DV?)?

The NX card is not required to review edits in real time, it just helps with input and output. How much you can do in real time is dependent on your computer specs, not the NX card.