Edius Neo

There are two version of EDIUS - the full version and EDIUS NEO. Neo is exactly the same program as the full EDIUS but without some of the more advance features.  Neo may do everything that you need for editing and now with support to the Grass Valley HDSPARK and FireCoder Blu you can watch your edits in full HD and export quickly to Blu-ray and DVD.

EDIUS NEO's strengths

EDIUS strengths are its stability and realtime performance and you get exactly the same with Neo.  Neo also has EDIUS' multi-track timeline, mixed-format HD/SD editing, excellent realtime chromakeying, titling using EDIUS' QuickTitler which can do realtime rolling and crawling titles as well as, and DVD authoring.

Using the Grass Valley FIRECODER Blu board you can export quickly to Blu-ray from the Neo timeline.  Also with Neo2 you can use the Grass Valley HDSPARK PCI Express board that gives you real-time, HDMI output so you can see you editing in full HD on a decent screen.  Neo does not support other Grass Valley hardware, such as the HDSTORM and STORM 3G, but you do not really need inputs with most of the modern AVCHD or HDV cameras so it may not be an issue

Neo 3 also includes the new range or 3D GPU based transitions that were first seen in EDIUS 5. These add exciting effects such as page wipes, bouncing balls and explosions.  Also in Neo 3 is the animatable layout tool.  This lets you easily crop and do animated picture in picture effects - both 2D and 3D - with your video or stills.  It also maintains the quality of any high res stills as you pan around them making it great for image montages.  Neo also has the MASK TOOL introduced in EDIUS 6 - which means that in a program at this price you can have keyframable, feathered mask which you can animated - something only the province of compositing programs previously!

Format support

Neo supports AVCHD, HDV, AVI and QuickTime files and Windows Media on the timeline.  It does not support Panasonic DVCPro HD, Sony XDCamHD or XDCam-EX  and various other high end formats.  For these you need to get the full version of EDIUS.

Specifications

Supported video formats: AVCHD, MPEG-2, HDV, DV,Windows Media, QuickTime

Features NOT included in EDIUS Neo 3 (full version of EDIUS 6 required):

• No project size customization (Select project size from presets) - you have presets for all the standard sizes for DV, HDV and AVCHD, but you cannot make your own.
• No support for 2K/4K project size - bigger than high defintion.
• No 10-bit support - DV, HDV. AVCHD & Blu-ray all work at 8 bit colour, but broadcasters would want more.  EDIUS 6 can work in 10 bit colour, which means better quality gradients etc.. but you only need this for higher end work.
• Rendering format cannot be selected (already preset) - In full EDIUS you can choose from a range of codecs into which to render.  Neo is fixed, although the fixed settings are normally the sensible ones.
• Timecode preset/mode is fixed
• Overscan size is fixed
• Audio channel mapping is fixed - this means you cannot export surround sound and certain ways of archiving are not possible.
• Stereo audio projects only (4-channel or more audio is not supported)
• No user profiles - In full EDIUS you can have different settings for different users and you can transfer user profile between computers.  In Neo you cannot - although you can save different windows layouts and switch between them.
• No project importer/exporter plugin - you cannot import or export projects from other programs using EDL and AAF.
• No proxy editing support - proxies are low resolution versions of your clips which you can use to edit if you computer cannot cope with your footage or the complexity of the effects.  This is not available in EDIUS NEO.
• No preview rotation/zebra pattern display - preview rotation lets you rotate the program monitor so you can make a tall thin piece of video (for a shop display for example). Zebra will give you an on-screen display of areas of the image which are over legal levels.
• No consolidate projects - consolidate lets you take a project and trim it down to just the sections used on the timeline.
• No multicam editing - line up up to 16 cameras and watch all of them at once and cut between them. 
• No TitleMotion Pro support - Title Motion Pro is a broadcast quality titler that will work in full EDIUS but not in NEO.  TMP is actually a discontiuned product anyway - Vistitle which is a new animated titling program for EDIUS, will work with NEO.  QuickTitler - Grass Valley's own titler which makes still, rolling and crawling titles comes with EDIUS NEO.
• No combine effects -  a filter that lets you take several EDIUS filters and combine them into one.  This does not mean you cannot combine filters though, since you can stack filters one on top of the other in NEO.
• No vectorscope/waveform - used for showing the exposure or the colour of an image and useful if you know how to interpret them.
• No EDIUS watch - EDIUS' watch folder lets you specify a location on your computer (a folder) and everytime a new clip pops up in this folder it automatically pops up in your EDIUS bin.  Useful for several people working on a network.
• No time remap - keyframable slow motion where a clip can start at 100%, slow down to 50%, then run backward, then forwards...
• No track matte keyer - use a clip on one track to cut  a whole in a clip on another.  A new filter for EDIUS 6.
• No After Effects plugin bridge - You can make certain After Effects plug-ins work in EDIUS using this bridge.  Some work and some do not - none of the effects that come with After Effects will work for example.
• No 3D picture-in-picture filter (3D picture-in-picture is supported in the new Layouter in EDIUS 6) - the layouter is better than the 3D pnp in any case!
• No audio adjustment by samples - you can take a clips audio and shift it by several samples (ie a 48Khz file will have 48,000 samples per second) rather than just by a frame, or 1/25th second. 
• No audio normalize - EDIUS will look at the level of a clip or number of clips and automatically increase the volume to that the they are as loud as possible.  You can still adjust audio levels in NEO using the rubber bands and filters.
• No batch export - in full EDIUS you can add several timelines to a batch and then they will all be encoded one after another.  In EDIUS NEO you can only export one timeline at a time.
• No SMPTE transitions - these are industry-standard wipes and you will only need them if trying to take a project to a vision mixer or maybe some other editing program via EDL.  The wipes which are in this list are covered in other transitions anyway.
• No Infinity JPEG 2000, P2, XDCAM, XDCAM EX, CANON XF, Ikegami GF, or GXF support - all higher end formats and one of the biggest differences between EDIUS Neo and EDIUS.
•  No K2 Connect

Bundled Software:

ProDAD video effects & image stabilization: VitaScene & Mercalli V2

Minimum System Requirements
CPU: Any Intel Core 2 or Core iX CPU. Intel or AMD single core CPU with a 3 GHz processor speed or faster (multiple CPUs and/or multi-core CPUs are recommended). SSE2 and SSE3 instruction set supported.

Memory: 1 GB RAM (4 GB or more recommended)

Hard Disk - 6 GB of hard disk space is required for installation (including third-party software) Drive with ATA100/7,200 RPM or faster is necessary for video storage: Available HDD disc space should be twice the size of the file to be edited.

Graphics Card: A graphics card supporting higher resolution than 1024x768 (32-bit), Direct3D 9.0c or later, and PixelShader Model 3.0 or later is required.   For SD editing: 256 MB or larger required, 512 MB or larger recommended. For HD editing: 512 MB or larger required, 1 GB or larger recommended.

Sound Card: A sound card with WDM driver support is required

DVD-ROM Drive: Required for software installation, Blu-ray Disc writer, DVD-R/RW, or DVD+R/RW drive is required when creating Blu-ray Discs or DVDs

Operating System: Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit)