Jump ship from Vegas, or not...
 

First of all, I'm using the Sony PMW-EX1. I'm hearing Edius 4.6 really performs well with the EX1.

Here's why I'm having a hard time jumping ship:

1. Sony Vegas Audio.
I've been working a lot with concert footage that requires 5.1 dolby digital.
Sony's automation and DD5.1 panner works excellent!
Well, I guess I could always export the main left/right channels as a wave file from edius and build up the 5.1 in Sony Vegas. I could also render out a quick video from Edius to throw on the timeline in vegas while doing the audio.

Can you think of an easier way?

Other than that, I'm hearing Edius 4.6 will play EX1 mp4 files right from the timeline in real time. Is this correct. Yes, I realize it depends on CPU.



2. Blu-ray support internal within.
I like Vegas 8.0B programs ability to quickly burn a blu-ray right from the timeline. It will also burn it right to a standard DVD (albeit only around 30 minutes).

Also, where the heck is the authoring program for Blu-ray. We all know Blu-ray is it now, so where's the support???

Steve...

As you know, I've already made the change. In all practicality, I offer my following observations:

1-it may be worth your while to wait until after NAB, to see if Sony has offered an update that fixes their current problems
2-Edius does NOT, currently, offer a 1920x1080 work space. So all the EX1 HQ formats have to be imported into Edius in a 1440x1080 format. They are working on a 1920x1080 format, but, no word when it will be available.
3-Grass Valley Procoder 3.05 will currently render out to a 1920x1080 format, including Blu-ray. Unfortunately, you'd need to purchase the PC3.05 software. Edius Pro only comes with PC1.0

Personally, I am looking at Avid. It's an industry standard, albeit rather expensive. With a student discount, you can pick up MediaComposer for about $250.

Thanks Bill.

You just saved me some $$...

I will wait and see what comes down at NAB.

I'm hoping Sony gets it together with color space and level management.
This is really getting frustrating for many.

It's VERY strange that Sony has not at least offered some sort of white paper that detailed what needs to be set depending on source, plugins used (gets messy with 8 bit plugins in a 32 bit setting), and destination codecs.

Edius 4.6 always had a 1920x1080 23.94P project preset, the blu-ray standard. It doesn't offer 30p at this time.

The lack of audio tools is frustrating indeed, but exporting a wave file after finishing with video and processing it with your favorite app (Audition for me), then bringing it back is fairly easy and fast.

Why not take Edius for a test drive? The trial version is fully functional for a month... see if you like it or not.

You may not realise it but Edius has AAF export allowing you to output your project to After Effects, Vegas and any other AAF supporting soft.

I run Edius and use Vegas 8 pro for audio work, with AAF its pretty simple.

Also the big plus with Edius is not just the realtime and multi format capabilities, but with the implementation of an NX card you get realtime, full resolution straight from the timeline, none of that frame rate and resolution changing stuff - the NX also gives me live out from After Effects straight to my HD monitor - essential.

Of course you must choose an NLE that suits your workflow, but drag and drop MP4 files from my EX1 into the Edius bin is too cool.

Paul

Also jumping ship from Vegas
 

I'm exploring my options right now since getting burned by Vegas on a recent paying project where I"m now losing money due to its inability to handle large files on the trimeline without seizing up.

I'm looking at Avid, Edius and have previous experience with PPro.

I've heard some positive info on Edius, but I can't seem to wrap my head around how the demo works, and I want to get up to speed pretty fast.

My work entails cuts and dissolves with titles and I am usually tweaking audio in a separate audio editing application.

How do you take a clips audio track out to edit sparately and then bring it back in to Edius? That was one feature I liked about Vegas and could do with RT editing in PPro with Audition.

Is the codec used in Edius comparable to Avid's DNxHD the Cineform Codec?

I'm a one man shooter/editor shop and want something I can rely upon. PPro is the least expensive, Edius is the middle ground and Avid is the most expensive. Vegas burned me and I won't be going back to it and need some advice on this issue for my work.

Cliff..

My observations on your questions:
1-cuts and dissolves
cuts as you would expect. dissolves are a bit different. vegas will automatically provide clip overlap to enable the dissolve. Edius and Avid will not. You will need to manually provide the overlap. This is done by using the source window. Much like the trimmer window in Vegas, edius and Avid use the source window to select the clip, via in-out points. In order to use a dissolve, there MUST me a head and tail to the clip you load in the record window. once you have the extra head/tail, just drop the FX(in this case a dissolve) on the cut line between the clips.

2-audio edit
just export as wav file, edit in your 3rd party app and reimport. if you want to use "takes" drop the editted audio clip on a new audio track and mute the unused track

3-Codec properties
Canopus HQ is an intermediate, much like DVCPro, cineform or DNxHD. It works in YUV, while the others work in RGB.

Bill - Any advantages/disadvantages to working in YUV over RGB?

well, camera sensors "see" in RGB but convert to YUV for storage. When you import to your NLE, you import YUV and the NLE converts it back to RGB for editting. Except for Edius and FCP, anyway, which keep the files in YUV.

There are some pretty ugly color transformations going on in RGB->YUV->RGB. Some codecs handle it properly, others do not. I think there may be some image degredation going on everytime you convert. So, my THEORY is that it's a less corrupted image to avoid color transformations. Vegas has issues with this, altho' I'm sure I'll get an arguement from somebody. This is where 10-bit vs 8-bit processing really helps with more accurate transformations(less banding)

SO in essence, your theory is that there is one less convert involved and image quality is maintained.

Any good tutorials online for getting up to speed with Edius? There seems to be little that I can find that is solid information.

Edit: I also want to work on my laptop as well - I have a Dell D620 with 4GB RAM and two drives - one for OS and the other 250GB drive for editing. Any issues you can foresee??? I'm pretty much feeling like I'm going to be working in PPro unless I have a solid reason to work in Edius.

I know you said that Edius is linked to the broadcast industry - how does it stack up to Avid in your experience so far?

go to the Grass Valley/Edius forum. there's links there to some good tutorials.

I have edius on my Dell Inspiron laptop as well as on my custom built workstation. It works well on both, altho' I had to upgrade my video card to a Quadro FX1500 to get edius display to work well on my workstation. Stick with nVidia. Any of their cards are better than ATi. Avid will "require" nVidia.

IMHO, Edius is a nice application that needs further development, much like vegas was back in version 3, altho' still a bit primitive. Avid has been around since film cutting became digitized...over 30 years, I think. It is a very evolved and developed NLE with a lot of capability and depth, especially if you work with real film. Edius' cuts editting is somewaht primitive compared to Avid. If you can wish for a cuts/edit tool, Avid probably has it. To get the full understanding of editting on Avid, I had to go to film school. It was an invaluable learning experience to learn avid. If you could find a professional avid editor show you the ropes, you'll learn MUCH faster.

And, for me, film school is entirely Mac based, while my home studio is entirely PC based. Using an external drive formatted in HFS+, together with MACDRIVE on my home system, allows complete portability within AVID, Mac or PC based.

Right click on any video file (the type you're editing) stored on your computer, and go to properties. Under "opens with", change it to Adobe Audition. When editing in Edius, right click on the clip and click on "Open" - the audio will open in Audition. Edit in Audition and when you save, it's done. Not sure if it works with HDV though... have to test and report back.

Some basic Edius tutorials here.

It's not quite that straightforward. No software worthy of use calculates using 8-bit integers. Transformations of 8-bit images will almost always be calculated using 32-bit integers (if not, the programmers should be shot).

Where the issue of 8-bit vs. 10-bit integers vs. 32-bit floating point comes in is how the intermediate stages of a multiple step transformation are stored, either transiently or persistently (i.e., in memory during rendering or as an intermediate file on disk that will be further edited later).

For a single step process (e.g., applying luma gain), no benefit is obtained from a greater bit depth.

For a multiple step process (e.g., apply luma gain and adding a title), then it comes down to whether the software keeps the intermediate image at a higher depth than that of the native image format. I have no idea which NLE does what and if it this that the processing claims relate to.

I'm still amazed how few NLEs perform calculations within the Y'Cr'Cb' domain. There really isn't any excuse anymore for using RGB space. Everything that can be done in RGB space can be achieved in Y'Cr'Cb' - it just requires a different set of mathematical equations.

I'm also surprised that no NLEs exist (that I know of) that can work in the DCT domain (which decreases the processing requirement by an order of magnitude) nor perform smart rendering on an intraframe basis. i.e., every NLE out there (AFAIK) will completely decode and re-encode the entire image even if you change just one luma pixel. Though it may be harder for MPEG-type compression, considerable improvements in processing capability can be made. Unfortunately, the NLE developers rely on 3rd party codecs to do the grunt work.

Smarter algorithms could turn your dual core system into the equivalent of an 8-core.

For me Edius works better with HD footage on a laptop if you convert it to the "HQ" editing codec first, but then that sort of defeats the direct import benefits of tapeless recording with the EX1. I don't think either Edius or Premiere will be particularly smooth with native EX1 footage on a laptop, but maybe someone else can report otherwise.