Output to DVD and files

Moving menus

EDIUS can make simple DVDs off the timeline but has always been a bit limited.  Now to be hoinest yuou are never going to get an authoring program with the complexity of Adobe Encore or Sony DVD Architect built-in to an editing program but many people do not need those extra features.  With EDIUS 6 Grass Valley have added in all the features that most people will want for their videos.

The first is motion menus.  EDIUS 5 menus were all still images.  EDIUS 6 lets you setup an EDIUS sequence and use that as the background for your menu.  This could be a simple still image with a piece of music, or a complex composite using any of the tools inside EDIUS.

EDIUS creates its menus from templates.  There are new templates which can have up to 16 buttons on one menu.  The templates can be thoroughly customised so they can be almost anything you want (including of course having a moving background).  If you have 3 or 4 menus it was a pain customising one and then doing the same with all the others.  Now with EDIUS you can customise one and then copy and paste that customisation on to other menus.

DVD highlights

With EDIUS 6 you have more control over the look of the highlights on the menu as show here.  Customise your button and then get the highlight ot match the contours of your button.  You cannot change the colour of the hightlight.

DVD & Blu-ray settings

There are more options for encoding DVD and Blu-ray (particularly Blu-ray).  Grass Valley now support profile 4.1 for Blu-ray which means high bitrates for better quality H264 encoding.  You can also make a Blu-ray or DVD with 5.1 surround sound.

Grass Valley EDIUS does not mix surround sound, so you cannot use it to take footage and fly it around the room, but if you can create your surround sound mix in another program (Adobe Audition or Sony Sound Forge being the most obvious) or you filmed originally in surround sound, then you can get that onto the DVD or Blu-ray disc.  You just need to know how to set it up correctly (another topic to be covered in our forth coming EDIUS 6 tutorial).

Also notice the two new tick boxes:
"prohibit operations during playback" - This will force people to watch a particular piece of video, like a copyright notice as it disables all the controls on the DVD remote.
"display timecode" - write the timecode (This could be the timeline timecode, the source timecode or the source date and time information) onto the video as the DVD is made. 

These two options are available per timeline used on the DVD.  It is not a DVD-wide setting.

Print to AVCHD device

The file export options have remained pretty much the same although with a few additions - you can now export to an H264 standard definition file as well as HD for example.

Grass Valley have also added an AVCHD writer.  Take any footage and write it back to an AVCHD device - either the camera hard drive to a card - which you can then play in any AVCHD player. 

This is not just a camera - Panasonic Blu-ray players can take SD cards written in this way and play footage, and some of their HD TVs also come with an SD reader built-in and will play footage off the cards.  Now we have a different way of distributing HD footage apart from Blu-ray, which many people can use.