Edius Formats

Edius handles more formats than most editing programs and is usually the first to deal with a new format.  How does it deal with the various formats available?

Edius handles more formats than most editing programs and is usually the first to deal with a new format.  How does it deal with the various formats available?

What is Canopus HQ?

The problem with a lot of video formats these days is that they are heavily compressed.  This is great for filming as you can get and excellent picture in a small space - but bad for editing as it is hard work for the computer.  Or maybe you are capturing live into a computer and want to save the video in the best format possible.  However to keep it totally uncompressed is just too demanding as 1 hour of uncompressed HD can take up over 400GB space and will need at least two drives striped together to handle the speed requirements.

To overcome this Canopus developed their own way of dealing with video called the Canopus HQ format.

This saves video as a series of complete frames (rather than bits of frames like many compressed formats) and can maintain the picture quality whilst keeping the file size small.  Typically an hour of HDV sized footage in Canopus HQ format will take about 50GB space, compared to an hour of native HDV which will take about 13GB space.  As HQ is easy to deal with it means it is very fluid to edit, loads quickly and you can put lots of realtime effects on it.  This is one of the reasons Edius can do more in realtime than other editing programs with HD footage.

There are other formats available - Avid developed DNXHD, CineForm produced a codec widely used with Premiere and Apple made a codec called ProRes.  All of these are good but in our experience Canopus HQ has proved the best which is why we film all our tutorials directly into it.  (We actually record the output of the computer graphic card directly from one computer into another using Canopus Pegasus card.)

Canopus HQ can handle resolutions up to 1920 x 1080 and can have an alpha channel as well, making it a good choice for rendering with people doing animations.  It can also be varied in quality between small, low quality offline files right up to practically uncompressed.

SD formats

All the new formats being created are HD so when talking about formats we general only speak about HD versions.  However, Edius will also handle lots of SD formats.  There are so many possible ways of making video these days, including QuickTime, DIVX, Xvid, windows Media, lots if different  types of AVIs etc, that no program can support them all.  However, in our experience, if a file is going to load into any program it is probably Edius.

Edius can also rip video off DVDs an re-edit in (as long as it is not copyright protected) and is one of the few programs to load Dolby Digital sound files - the main way sound is saved on a DVD.  Adobe Premiere, for example, will not load Dolby Digital files, so even if you get the video off the DVD with a separate program, you then have to convert it before Premiere can use it.  With Edius you load disc capture, choose the title and import it. 

Since the way DVDs are made can be very variable there are some time when this procedure does not work but we have had a very good success rate.

Of course Edius handles all the popular camera SD formats, DV, DVCam, DVCPro, MPEG etc quite happily.

This new and highly compressed HD format is not supported by many programs at present. It is stored mainly as bits of frames, and is highly compressed and so you can get a very good picture into a small file. This makes it a good format for cameras that record to memory sticks, SD cards or hard drives but make it very hard to edit.

Edius can load the footage directly into the bin and you can edit with this footage.  However, as it is very heavily compressed it does not play very well within Edius even on our most powerful systems and you will not be able to achieve any realtime effects.  We would only suggest you use the footage in its native form where you need to do a quick edit with very little trimming or effects.

Edius is not alone - the other program we have that will load AVCHD footage, Sony Vegas, cannot play it back properly at full quality in realtime either.

The best option is to convert the footage to something more usable - with Canopus HQ being the best option.  With Edius you have two ways of converting the footage -either inside the program or using a standalone program developed by Canopus for just this purpose.   This stand alone program, called "Canopus AVCHD converter" comes with Edius and will convert the footage using the maximum about of processing power in your system.  If you have our top Quad core Xeon system it will race through 6 clips at the same time using 100% processing power.

On a single processor 2.66Ghz system, so not using our fastest Xeon machines, this took 1hr 25 mins to convert 2 hours footage. 

Because it is being converted it a much less compressed format for editing the converted footage takes up more space.  Our 2hrs original material, capture using a Panasonic HC5 camera at 1920 x 1080 pixels, took up 10GB space.  When converted it used 86GB space, so about 9 times as much.  This may sound bad but it isn't as hard drives are so cheap these days that space is not a problem.  Our standard quotes have 2 x 1TB drives in which is about 2000GB space or approx 40 hours space.  You can of course add more drives as you need them.

Because Edius has the easiest and fastest conversion method and produces files which are the same quality as the originals and easy to edit it is our favourite program for AVCHD editing currently.

Once converted the footage behaves like all other HD footage.  Since you will never put the footage back on the camera, as you would with a tape based camera you then need to put the footage to some kind of disc with Blu-ray as the obvious choice. 

See our section onediting AVCHD footage for more information on the different options..

Like AVCHD, when editing HDV footage you can either choose to edit the "native" format, which is what most programs do, or convert it to Canopus HQ for better performance.   HDV is heavily compressed but not as much as AVCHD so it is easier to edit and Edius does a good job of editing the native footage.  However it can do more with Canopus HQ and as it converts it on the fly as you capture from tape it takes no longer to get HDV captured and converted to HQ than it does to capture HDV natively.  As HDV is slightly smaller than the full AVCHD files mentioned about at either 1440 x 1080 or 1280 x 720 is takes about 13GB for one hour of native footage and about 50GB for 1 hour of Canopus HQ.

When you have finished editing you have two choices - record it back to HDV tape or make a Blu-ray disc. Either option will involve remaking your entire timeline into a new format and Edius does this faster than other programs. It will typically take and hour to 1½ hours to make an hours worth of footage back into the right format for recording to tape, and then another hour to record the tape. Most software would take 4-5 hours to make the file and then another hour to write the tape. The only system that comes close to the same performance is Premiere Pro with a Matrox card.

Edius can take footage directly from P2 cards and use it in the project.  DVCPro is not supported in Edius Neo, but as long as you use the full version of Edius 5 it will support it.  With version 3 and 4 of Edius there were two different versions of the program called Pro and Broadcast, and only the Broadcast version supported DVCProHD.  With Edius 5 this is not the case and it is only the low cost Neo that does not support DVCPro HD.

Edius is also one of the few programs to support Panasonics latest variation of DVCPro called AVC-Intra.  AVC-Intra is no relation to AVCHD, but a new format designed to get better quality and longer recording times on the cameras P2 cards.

You can also export the footage back to the cards as well as copy it off them.

There are  four formats of XDCam - XDCam, XDCAM-HD, XDCam-Ex and XDCAM HD422.  Edius 5 supports all of them.  For information on the differences please see our guide to HD formats.

With XDCam and XDCam-HD you can edit either the full quality files or the low res proxies created on the disc,  If editing the low res files you can set Edius to copy the High res files from the disc in the background and automatically replace the low res files with the high quality ones when this has been achieved.

With XDCam-EX the best way to import files is to use the free Sony Clip browser software - just select the clips in the clip browser and drag and drop then into the Edius bin. You do not have to convert to MXF or export to QuickTime as you would with Avid or Final Cut pro, just select the clips and load them into the program.

With the advent of Edius 5 you can also export back to XDCam-EX cards, something you cannot do with a Adobe Premiere.