EDIUS HDSPARK

Price: £215.00 (£252.63 Including VAT at 17.5%)

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With most cameras these days you get the picture from the capture to the computer via FireWire (for DV or HDV) or USB or card reader (for AVCHD, Panasonic DVCPro HD and Sony XDCam and XDCam-EX). If you don't need any inputs and all you really want is a way of watching the video while editing then you need the HDSPARK. You can either buy the HDSPARK on its own or with EDIUS 5 or EDIUS NEO.

EDIUS HDSTORM Plus

Price: £1,035.00 (£1,216.13 Including VAT at 17.5%)

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The HDSTORM PLUS is effectively a bundle of the HDSTORM with the STORM bay so you get HDMI, component, composite and SVIDEO in and out.   Apart from letting you capture from any source you have - SD or HD, so you can bring in old VHS and Hi8 tapes, as well as HD footage from a variety of sources, you can also output to a whole variety of screens.  Modern HD screens have HDMI as the standard connection but older Standard definition TVs will not.  Even if you have an HD screen with HDMI in we have found that even if it works at HD resolutions they do not often work as SD resolutions.  Our current favourite HD screens will do all HD resolutions but only 16:9 SD in PAL.  If editing SD as well as HD you may want to consider using the HDSTORM because if the HDMI does not properly with your screen, the analogue component or SVIDEO will.  This is not a problem with the HDSTORM card, rather a problem with certain screens - the same screens will probably not take a standard definition input from your HD camera.

The HDSTORM now works on Windows XP, Vista 32 and Vista 64.

The HDSTORM comes with EDIUS 5, Corel Movie Factory, NewBlue FX, Prodad Mercalli and Vitascene and a range of VST plug-ins.  The HDSTORM bundle does not include Title Motion Pro, which is included with some versions of EDIUS, although you can buy is separately.  The QuickTitler program included will do still, rolling and crawling titles, Title Motion Pro as animation per character which is totally customisable as well as proper 3D titling.

For details on systems built around the HDSTORM visitour system pages.

EDIUS HDSTORM

Price: £805.50 (£946.46 Including VAT at 17.5%)

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HDSTORM Bay

Price: £375.00 (£440.63 Including VAT at 17.5%)

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HDTHUNDER

Price: £1,780.00 (£2,091.50 Including VAT at 17.5%)

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This board has SD and HD-SDI i/o to EDIUS 5.  You can capture into a whole variety of formats including Canopus HQ, lossless and uncompressed.  To handle uncompressed HD footage you will need a couple of fast hard drives set up in a RAID array but for most other resolutions a normal SATA drive is sufficient.

The HDTHUNDER also comes with an HDMI output socket so you can view your edits on a low cost HD screen.  It will also output HD-SDI if you have this on your monitor. This is a mini-HDMI socket - a very new type of connection which has only just started appearing on hardware.  Its does everything an HDMI socket will do but is smaller.  You will need to make sure you have amini-HDMI cable to connect this to a standard screen.

The HDTHUNDER comes with EDIUS 5, Corel Movie Factory, NewBlue FX, Prodad Mercalli and Vitascene and a range of VST plug-ins and Title Motion Pro.

HDTHUNDER FEATURES

• HD/SD-SDI input and output with embedded audio and timecode
• HDMI (mini Type C) output for full resolution real-time monitoring from the included EDIUS 5 NLE software
• Embedded HDMI audio output for high quality audio monitoring
• Video and audio output stays perfectly in sync with editing windows for accurate editing and trimming
• Reference input supports blackburst or tri-level sync
• RS-422 master or slave machine control  support
• Edit any mix of SD and HD resolution video content together in real time
• Works with many different native video formats, including DV, HDV,AVCHD, uncompressed, and more
• Real-time SD/HD resolution, aspect ratio and frame rate conversion and output, including 16:9 to 4:3 and NTSC to PAL
• New GPU-accelerated 3D transitions
• Real-time editing performance increases as CPU power increases
• Supports newer file-based formats, including Infinity™ JPEG 2000, XDCAM and XDCAM EX, P2 (DVCPRO and AVC-Intra), and GFCAM
• PCI Express Rev. 1.1 x4 lane
• Compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista

For details on systems built around the HDTHUNDER visitour system pages..

FIRECODER Blu

Price: £399.00 (£468.83 Including VAT at 17.5%)

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The FIRECODER Blu is a faster than realtime MPEG2 and H264 encoder. You can convert AVCHD to MPEG2, MPEG2 to H264 and also up-convert and down-convert (change HD to SD) using the software supplied.

We fed it with some AVCHD footage filmed with the Panasonic AG-HMC151 camera and it took around 2 minutes to convert 5 minutes of original footage. Going the other way, converting MPEG HD footage to H264 took about the same amount of time. It was about the same for converting HD footage to standard def MPEG footage, and the quality was excellent.

It runs either using a standalone converter program, or as an export option direct from the Edius timeline. It can be used in systems with other editing software, though you would have to export an AVI file and then convert this with the FIRECODER application. This would still be quicker than exporting into H264 from a Premiere timeline where, even on a really good system, we have had the computer take 7 hours to encode 1 hour of footage.

FIRECODER Blu comes with a simple DVD/Blu-ray writing program which will make discs of either type with just video on. You cannot use it to make menus on a DVD or Blu-ray disc although you can add chapters. The settings are pretty simple - FIRECODER Blu as three quality levels (high, medium and low) and can encode at three different sizes: 720x576, 1440x1080 and 1920x1080.

Why use FIRECODER Blu?

To take your final movie and quickly make a decent Blu-ray disc. Even if you take into account making an AVI file first it will be seriously quicker than encoding to H264 from the editing application just using the power of your computer.

To take AVCHD files, which are hard to edit and make them into something a lot easier for programs to use: MPEG2. You could add it to an Avid Liquid system, for example - Liquid does not deal with AVCHD at all but would take MPEG2 files happily and the FIRECODER Blu would create these a lot quicker than any other software. It would also be useful with Adobe Premiere for exactly the same reason - Premiere Pro CS3 does not understand AVCHD and even though Premiere Pro CS4 does, it is still a struggle to do any realtime effects and using native H264 has a serious impact on the final render times (when you make your final Blu-ray or DVD discs) MPEG would be easier and nice to use.