Edius Interface

The main interface of Edius is similar to most editing programs. You have a source and destination window, a project window where you can organise all your clips, different windows showing all your available effects, markers and information about the clips and a timeline where the video is laid out. You can have several sequences open at once and sequences can be put inside other sequences for multi-layered effects.

The timeline can have the audio either with the video clip or it can be separated into different tracks either just by dragging or using Edius' track mapping. With the latter you can decide to split a stereo track onto two mono sound clips and route them to different tracks or add them as a stereo pair.

It has been designed to be tidy - when you capture there is no new window, the player window becomes the capture window.  The trimming window simply takes over the main two windows when needed as does the multi-camera window.  Premiere, for example, uses a new window for each of these and so you have may windows to content with.  Edius is simple.

Titling

You have 3 possible options for titling with Edius, Quick Titler, Title Motion Pro and Heroglyph.  There is one bundle called the Canopus Creative HD Suuite that comes with HeroGlyph and not Title Motion, apart from that you will generally get both Title Motion and Quick Titler when you buy the program.

Quick Titler

As the name suggests is good for making simple titles quickly.  It is great for making simple still titles in a hurry.  You have a large degree of control over the fonts, edges, shadows etc, can use a preset style or save a style for future use and have tools for drawing basic shapes. It does not do animation although you can make rolling and crawling titles.  In most programs rolling and crawling titles have to be rendered, with Edius they playback in realtime. 

Title Motion Pro

 This program can make very high quality titles and has more options than Quick Titler.  It also has a range a preset styles and templates for you to customise.  One of its biggest advantages is that it can animate text - right down to animating text per character if you want to.  It can also do proper 3D titles, giving each character depth and bevels and then flying them around in 3D or even exploding them.

The effects you can achieve with Title Motion Pro are very impressive.  The only slight problem is the program has its own way of working which takes a bit of time to grasp.  We have included a section on animating titles in our Edius tutorial.

Still image titles playback in realtime.  When you make an animated titles with Title Motion Pro it renders the title to a file which, when you add it to the timeline plays back in realtime - this process is still pretty fast.

Title Motion Pro is supplied with most Edius bundles but does not come with Edius Neo, or the DVX.

Titles can be put onto the video tracks or Edius' special title track.  On the latter they can use Edius' title mixers - ways of getting the titles to appear and disappear.  These include fades and blurs, various wipes and slides.  When you add a title Edius will automatically add the default title mixer, normally a dissolve, for 1 second (or whatever default length you choose).  You can make it longer or short just by dragging the on screen icons.  Also Edius either inserts the title at the default lenght, or if you set an in an out on the timeline makes the title fix the in and out points.

The net upshot is that if you want to add a title which just fades in for a second, stays on screen for a bit, then fades out for a second, you mark and in an out on the timeline, click add title and type it, then click ok, and the rest is done automatically.  Edius is full of little things like this which speed up editing.

ProDad Heroglyph

ProDad's program does excellent high quality titles and can animate on a character by character basis. It does not do 3D titles, however, it scores over Title Motion Pro by being a lot easier to use. It works on the basis of using pre-prepared motion templates Heroglyph can also be purchased separately from theDVC webshop.

Multiple sequences in one project

Break your edit up into smaller sections and then string the all together in one timeline, or have several copies of the same edit in one sequence. You can also put several clips into one sequence, drop it into a second and then apply effects to the whole sequence.

This is a great way to edit but the biggest problem with every editing program is that when you have loads of sequences together the timeline gets so complicated that the editing program struggles to keep up. How does Edius fare? Well in our tests extremely well.

Edius has always been great at managing large projects with lots of media and handles sequences in sequences the same way. We put about 60 sequences with multiple cuts in each into one main sequence and Edius remained responsive and stable as we opened lots at one, edited and move back and forth between them. Brilliant!

Great trimming options

Edius has lots of trimming options on the timeline and a dedicated trimming window.  Unlike Adobe Premiere which loves 100s of windows, Edius simply replaces the main window with the trimming window when required.  You can do all the variations of trim you need including slipping, slidding, roller and ripple.  You can trim without using the trimming window on the timeline and Edius can either ripple all or some of your video tracks as needed or not as required.

User Accounts

In Edius you create a user account for each person using the computer and then any change they make to the layout, buttons, screen arrangement or keyboard shortcuts is saved. All you have to do is logon with your user account and Edius is instantly set up the way you like it.  You can save the user account and move it between computers so each Edius can be configured exactly how you like it as well.

Keyboard and display customisation

Everyone knows that if you can remember the keyboard short cuts in a program then you can edit fast. Edius had keyboard short cuts for nearly everything, and with version 4 these were rationalised as much as possible so they are really obvious - c for cut for example.  However, you may want to set your own and so Edius has a great keyboard customisation option which pops up a picture of the keyboard and lets you drag commands on to it.

You can also customise the buttons on screen, the size, the text, the information that pops up in a tool tip when you move over a clip and more. 

Multicamera

Take up to 8 cameras, sync them up and then watch all on screen at once together cut between them.

Edius' mulitcamera works in a very simple way. Put the clips on the timeline one above the other. Sync them up either visually or using some queue point. Then enable multicamera. Depending on the setting - 3 cameras, 5, or 8, you will see the the source footage and the master shot on screen at the same time.  Then just play the timeline and press on the picture (or use the keyboard) to cut between cameras.  When you have finished you can still tweak each cut point, add camera angles etc to your hearts content.  When you are finished you can "compress to a single track" which makes your edit into on video track with a bunch of cuts between them, and then if you like add transitions to the whole lot by just selecting the entire track and dragging the transition on to it.

Simple to set up and use and one of the easiest multi cameras there is.  Because of Edius' realtime performance you will probably be able to play all 8 cameras at once as well, even with HD on a good computer!

Date and time information can be printed on screen

Edius is one of the few programs that lets you see the  date and time information stored in the video clip. DV and the new HD formats store a lot of information in the files and yet most programs do not let you see this information.  Edius not only puts this information in the bin but it can be printed on the output screen, and this can even be burnt into a final file or tape just like the timecode information.

This is really useful info - if you are making a home video you can print on screen the date and time an event happened; for surveylance videos you can have the exact date and time printed on screen at all times, and if you are matching up clips from different sources (or even from a video tape and a digital audio source) you may not have matching timecode but you can at least synchronize the clocks on different filming devices so that you can get a reasonably accurate match of which take is which when editing.

Time re-mapping

Edius always had great slow motion - but apart form just getting a clip to play at 30% or 25% you can also ramp the speed up and down.  Start at 100%, slow it down to 25%, then run it backwards, then forwards at 300% and generally play around to your hearts content. Apart from being fun for all the family this effect is useful - you only have to watch a modern TV drama to see it in use all the time.

Most programs now do this but the Edius version is easy to understand and is also realtime, even with HD footage.  Slow motion is a moving effect and to see the results properly you need to see it moving.  With other programs you will get a preview but not a full speed effect, which means less time rendering and more time working.

Other Plug-ins

Boris FX and Red plug into Edius to allow you to do more complex effects and compositing.

ProDad's range of effects also plug-in to Edius and add a large range of excellent and useful features. Adorage is a range of fancy transitions which ships with some versions of Edius. Soundsoap, which also ships with some versions, is a great audio plug-in for noise reduction.

Click here for more information on the plug-ins available.

Audio editing

Edius can edit audio down the the frame level.  You can easily split the audio into left and right channels, pan the audio left to right, and ramp the level up and down.  There is also a good selection of audio filters included with Edius 5 including compressors, EQ and pitch shifting.

It can also handle audio with up to 8 audio tracks which you can add to the timeline en-masse.  However it does not do surround sound editing.  If presented with a surround sound clip you can choose which tracks you use on the timeline but they will become a stereo pair not a surround sound track.

Adobe Premiere Pro has more advanced sound editing, as does Sony Vegas, with both editing down to the sample level, with surround sound, and with tracks that can be routed to different buses and have effects applied on a track or clip level.  Edius sound editing is comparable to Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere 6 (the latter is no longer available, having been replaced by Premiere Pro a few years ago, but it may help you to gauge the level of Edius audio editing).

Edius also has a good voiceover tool, which lets you play the timeline and record to a track whilst doing so, and excellent support for VST plug-ins which means there is a huge range of possible add-on effects available.

You can also add a mixer to carry out live mixing of sound.  The Behringer BCF2000 can control up to 8 tracks at once and you can control the panning and volume live when playing the timeline.  Once you have made your adjustments to the timeline you can then manually twaek them using the mouse.

The Behringer is about £100 and you can order it from us at DVC.

Output

When it comes to getting your footage out of Edius it can handle just about any format including converting PAL to NTSC and vice versa. The export interface was re-written for Edius 5 and can handle many different formats including those for Blu-ray, DVD, HDV, XDCam, DVCPro, Windows Media, QuickTime, various phone formats and lots more.

If there are not enough output options then you can add Canopus ProCoder 3 which is one of our favourite programs for remaking video and will plug-in to Edius 5.

Output from Edius is faster than most programs. For example a 30 minute wedding which we needed to output to HD Windows Media format took 5 hours in Edius (using a single 3.4Ghz processor) and 12 hours from Avid Liquid!

Also later this year Canopus will be shipping a device called a Blu-coder which will do "faster than realtime" encoding not H264 for Blu-ray writing.  We do not have an exact arrival date for this device or a proper price yet although we expect it to be £500-£700.  H264 is one of the best formats to use for Blu-ray, however, it takes a long time to make even on a fast computer, so a device that will make it faster than realtime will be a godsend.  We will post more information here when it happens.