New effects

The mask tool is the next generation of the old "region filter".  This lets you apply an effect inside or outside of an area and keyframe it so it moves across the screen.  This can be any of EDIUS range of filters or you could just say make the area outside the mask transparent.

In the clip here we have have cut out the shape of the crawling man to superimpose him on another image.  Notice that you can soften or "feather" the edges of the mask either inside, outside or both.

You can also have multiple shapes in the same filter.  If you have 3 people's faces you need to blur then put a mask on each one and they will all be blurred, all in the one filter.

Masks can be rectangular, spherical or a hand drawn shape complete with bezier curves.  The only way to get better masking than this is to use a full-blown compositing program like Adobe After Effects.

The layouter

The layout tool was always good for image pans and cropping images but lacked a few things.  Well no longer!

The new "layouter" can now rotate and move clips in 2D and 3D as well as add boarders and crop images.  You can now do all your image scalling and moving in one filter, without the need to use the old 2D Pnp and 3D PNP.  These are still there but the layouter now covers all the tasks.

It is also a filter, not a keyer  and you can move it's position in the list of effects, so you can apply and effect like a mask first and then apply the layouter.

As one of the new effects in EDIUS 6 it also works in 10 bit colour space on 10 bit projects.

The track matte

When ever we compared EDIUS 5 to Premiere Pro we would say "EDIUS lacks some filters that Premiere has, like a track matte".  Not with EDIUS 6.  Now we have a track matte filter which lets you lay out 3 video tracks, and make a hole in clip using the video placed on another.

In this example we have two pieces of video with a title and the words DVC in between.  Add the track matte and the title cuts a whole in the video.  However as this on the video track we can now add some motion the title and the hole in the video will move around.  You can use any video so you can disappear off to After Effects, for example, to make a really complex mask using their new "rotobrush" tool, export that as a black and white image, and load that into EDIUS as a matte for your video.

Better alpha channel support for plug-ins

In EDIUS 5, when you applied certain effects like this light beam effect from Vitascene, on to a title then the light beam would not appear properly on the final screen.  This has been fixed with EDIUS 6 so EDIUS will handle Alpha channel effects like this properly.  Hooray!

After Effects plug-in now build in!

Grass Valley introduced a beta version of the After Effects plug-in (a way to use plug-ins designed for After Effects inside EDIUS).  This is now built-in to EDIUS 6.  How well various plug-ins work is variable but it does pave the way for more and better plug-ins for EDIUS.