Canopus Eduis 3.0 Vs. Liquid Edition 6.0 For HDV Capture and Real time editing

[Joel Corral]

Steven,

There is nothing wrong with Ppro, I love it and as I mentioned in a earlier posts I have been using Premiere since v5.0. It’s Cineform that I do with out. I still don't see the point in using an intermediate codec for editing. m2t>avi>m2t- then i am finished? NO WAY! I can tell you this, the performance I am getting off my single processor 3.2gHz 533 FSB PC with a gig a ram is very good in the Software only version of Canopus Edius. I get (I would say) 98% RT WITH color effects and a slow motion effect. Not bad and thats in native m2t. (Not the HQ codec some people have referred to.) Listen, I tested out AspectHD 2.5 & 3.0 and it just doesn’t come close to the quality and performance (Native m2t editing) as Eduis. Another issue I have is when I captured using the HDlink and from Ppro I get "broken up" frames and green screens. (I don't with Edius). Another, sometimes when I would add an effect the picture would turn upside down and get very pinkish redish. These alone are enough to look the other way. Not to mention that you got to wait before you can edit. Edius is very easy to use and is rock solid 1080i HDV Editing and I also get great results when I do 1080i to 720p Down conversion using Procoder Express that comes with it all for near the same price a AspectHD “PLUGIN”.


Joel

[Joel Corral]

<<<-- Originally posted by Steven Gotz : Joel,

I know that the solution is not perfect, but it works great for me. It could be faster. But the effects are sufficient for my needs, as are the transitions. And the realtime editing is great.>>>


The Edius solution is so far PERFECT! :)

j

[Steven Gotz]

Perfect? Wow, that's great. That means you can copy from an After Effects timeline to a Edius timeline?

I don't know why you were getting broken frames. I don't. And I don't know why you got green screens and upside down video. I don't.

But your claims that Edius is perfect are simply nonsense. I am glad you are happy. I am happy with Aspect HD. But neither are perfect.

[Joel Corral]

Steven,

Its not nonsense. How are you biasing your level of perfection? Does a application have to integrate well with Adobe products to be perfect? When I say perfect I am stating that thus far there is nothing I can complain about the Edius software. everything works well with absolutely no flaws and never crashed. i get great high quality professional HDV results. If I have a project to do in after effects, no problem just render it out and import it into Edius. Easy as 1-2-3.


joel :)

[Ken Hodson]

Joel
"I still don't see the point in using an intermediate codec for editing."

Speed, colour correction, any FX work. Native Mt2 is not ideal for any of these.

"Listen, I tested out AspectHD 2.5 & 3.0 and it just doesn’t come close to the quality and performance "

Are you kidding? You really can't do much with a mt2 file befor it falls apart. And performance is frickin light years over native mt2 editing. Unless maybe you have an ill configured system with no RAID to handle the larger intermediate file size of the Cineform .avi. Were you trying to run it with your 533 bus P4 system? Cineform needs (excels with) dual channel ram and 800fsb+. A 2.8 P4 with 800fsb would run laps around your system.

"Another issue I have is when I captured using the HDlink and from Ppro I get "broken up" frames and green screens. (I don't with Edius). Another, sometimes when I would add an effect the picture would turn upside down and get very pinkish redish."

Well you probably know very well this is not the norm. Cineform tech support would resolve these issues I'm sure. Did you ever contact them?

"Not to mention that you got to wait before you can edit."

My capture conversion time is very close to real-time. HT has been enabled in the latest releases and has sped this up greatly.

As far as NLE preferance goes, to each their own. I don't care what anyone uses. But don't give a half-assed shot at some software on a sub-minimum recommended system and then announce it is crap. Editing native mt2 is crap. That is why all but the entry level NLE's have made an intermediate codec part of their high end package.

[Joel Corral]

thanks ken,

now why don't you chill a little, i never insulted anyone why are you insulting me? my whole point is with my pc configuration i get great results with Edius. if you read others who posted the whole point for Aspecthd that you are able to get good results with a "not so beefed up system" , not the case with me. i get better results with edius. and eduis is not a entry level application. it may lack some features but it's not entry level have you tried it for your self? if not you have no say in whats more efficient than another.


J

[Ken Hodson]

Telling you your system is subpar for running AspectHD is NOT a insult Joel. We are talking NLE's here, nothing personal.
I am making no comments as to how well Edius works. If it is good for you all the better. It was you who were painting AspectHD with a negative brush. Apparently with a corrupt software install and a sub recommended sytem spec to boot. Many of us here use AspectHD and think it is an amazing product, even for the $. We are in a little disagrement with your opinion of native mt2 editing as being better.

[Joel Corral]

ken,

try it and see the light they have a 30 day demo on there site.

[Ed Szarleta]

Will have a fully functional copy of Edius 3.22 this weekend. I will run tests with it's Long GOP vs Liquid's Long GOP vs Aspect HD on my P4 3.2 and dual Xeon box.

Although Joel swears his performance on the Edius SW is better than the AspectHD, I just don't see it.

Sorry for my scepticism Joel, but I just can't see Edius with 1080i footage in Long GOP even playing back two layers on your machine. Liquid give mes about 1 layer with some effects without breaking up on my P4 3.2 800FSB and V7100 FireGL. Even if Edius is on par with LE 6.1 (which I doubt), your machine is radically underspeced for Long GOP editing. How many fps are you getting on your timeline in just playback with some minor cc?

I am not trying to start a fight, simply expressing my opinion based on compareable product. If Edius can edit LongGOP as well as you claim, I have found a new editor. But unfortunately, I think your claims are a bit exaggerated.

We will soon find out, either way. Report back on Sunday night with results. Just had twins, so it's going to be a busy first Easter for them. :)

[Kevin Shaw]

Ed: if it's not too much trouble, please comment on what editing features are supported in real time on your system with each of the respective applications. Also, a quick test of WMV and MPEG2 encoding times would be informative. Thanks!

[Randy Donato]

Hi Ed, I have a Canopus Nx card and dual 3.6 Xeons and you are right about 2 layers of .m2t and a choke down....and I saw above where someone claimed they could do 3 layers with Pinnacle....baloney. m2t is just too tough....it is an extremely hi bitrate very compressed format that just kills the processors and anyone who needs to do serious editing just can't use it with even the top of the line machines like mine...and it doesn't matter what editing app has it on their timeline. I think Joel is capturing to Canopus HQ and mistaking that for .m2t.
About Cineform....I think David Newman will agree that if you want full frame full resolution output to external monitor and not the "accelerated" version that is frankly very clever and good(but not as good as full frame full resolution) then even with aspect you are talking about dual Xeons. Both aspect and canopus have great codecs. They both use variable bit rate that has quality settings and are both 4:2:2.
Where I think Canopus has the edge is the hardware card right now does the overlay work(using aspect it is done by the processor)...more importantly the card does all the line scaling which is very important and a big burden on the processor without the card when you have mixed formats on the timeline like SD stuff with HDV or different aspect ratio material. The canopus card will also be used in the future to provide hardware acceleration of effects(new effects are in the works that will use the card) and most importantly for anyone who has had the pleasure of rendering Aspect,Canopus HQ or any other codec back to .m2t or any other usable format then the future planned hardware encoder/daughter board will be a must have....
What I find hard to reconcile is talk about 3 and 4 layers (using accelerated preview)with Aspect(which tells me RT is important to the user) and how you get to stay with the full features of PPro...the problem there is Aspect as a plugin has only a few RT filters(color correction and pan zoom) and 3 or 4 basic categories of transitions....all the native Ppro stuff has to be rendered (not including motion and opacity). Edius on the other hand has 25 plus filters and tons of transitions (including the same type wipes, fades etc as Aspect) and they do NOT have to be rendered(unless you stack too many tough ones up). Edius also comes with Inscriber title motion pro(a HD version) and just makes the native Ppro titler(which you may recall originated from inscriber) look just plain.
Edius has much lower overhead than Ppro and is much stabler. It is only in a 3.0 version and yes there are some big time features I miss from Ppro like matte handling and nested sequences but they are coming SOON!! Audio editing is way ahead in Ppro and canopus needs to do some serious catching up. I use audition to sweeten and edit audio but there are many things I wished I could do without exiting edius that you can in ppro.Don't anyone kid them selves it has a learning curve but not any worse than any professional product.

To me here is the bottom line. Aspect is great if you are married to Ppro and work with a P4 type machine. Edius without a card will do a lot on a P4 OHCI but since it is full frame full resolution editing it will not perform as well as the accelerated preview version that aspect offers....it will give you more effects that will not have to be rendered though. The wavelet technology is as good a preview for the money and is a nice way to get decent preview without stopping playback on a lower spec machine...but don't confuse that with full frame full resolution RT playback, they are different and all you need to do is some tough keying to see the strengths of Canopus full resolution benefits. Aspect is also great if you work flow does not need RT for anything more than color correction, simple Pips and transitions. The combo with ppro is great if you don't mind rendering the native full features that you use.But
If you can afford dual Xeons and a NX type card then the Edius solution can't be beat "for now". I really think once you start seeing HDV in full frames full resolution on a 1080i monitor while you edit in Rt with lots of layers, filters, titles and transitions you will know what I mean. You guys don't know what you are missing seeing this quality(HDV) in full glory. Oh BTW I can't swap between AE but I can composite inside Edius with Boris Red and do just about everything I could do in AE. In some cases more.

[Steven Gotz]

It would be difficult to argue that it is possible to throw a lot of money at a new PC with dual processors and a hardware accelerator and not get a better editing experience. I can picture myself getting into that one of these days perhaps.

But claiming that the software only solution is far superior to Aspect HD is just plain unreasonable. And that is what Joel is claiming.

I envy you Randy, but it just isn't time to get rid of my PC just yet. Maybe by the end of the year. And at that point I may have even more options.

[Randy Donato]

"But claiming that the software only solution is far superior to Aspect HD is just plain unreasonable. And that is what Joel is claiming."
I think Joel does have some good points and here is my experiance on a P4 3.2 with Edius(no harware acccleration) and using canopus HQ. I can get 3 layers(one background and 2 pips) to play for about 10secs and 2 layers all day. The preview is full frame full resolution and you could hook a camera ohci and a monitor to that and get monitor out. I can do one filter like CC or blur and titles, and transitions and still maintain Rt playback full resolution. I have tried Aspect and if I didn't have my rig I would bottom line use both edius and PPro with Aspect. Edius OHCI doesn't carry the overhead PPro does and it also doesn't have as much keyframing(part of the reason for lower overhead) so it is a give and take. If you were to turn accelerated preview off in aspect my bet is Edius will outperform it software only....Now I agree that the preview mode that aspect has is really nice and I wouldn't turn it off unless I was keying or doing really technical CC. I think the point is edius ohci is an option with more features RT than Aspect....but on a layer stacking basis Aspect will win since it degrades preview(very cleverly) to get its RT...they are both worthy options and again if Ppro is your soulmate it is a no brainer....stick with aspect. If you want RT with more filters take a look at edius ohci....if you want the best get a dual machine and a hardware card.

[George Ellis]

Randy, you can choice not to believe, but LE 6.1 will do three layers of 1080i. I just took Kaku Ito's M2T footage (LE does not directly support transport), ran it through HDTV2MPEG, loaded it clips on line 5, 6, and 7. I applied a GPU PIP to clip 6 and 7 with the PIPs over- lapping about 25%. After a 1 minute render (where I could play it, but the frame rate was about 5 frames in each window per second), it will now play at 29fps in all the layers. The files are IPB Mpeg-2 MP@H4. I tried a capture with Windows Media Encoder, but it drops too many frames to show it.

[Randy Donato]

I must have misunderstood...what I am talking about is editing the native Sony format( .M2T or TS whatever you want to call it). No way 3 layers....I can barely do two for a few secs. Now if we are talking about a mpeg 2 format with a lower bitrate I bet edius can stay step for step....in fact edius was the first NLE that let you mix mpeg 2 and Dv on the TL. It cuts through mpeg 2 like butter. What I would like to know is what type quality hit does the source take to get there....my guess is it is serious. And if you have to render that is not RT to me...but I am confused about the render and the 5,6,7 business. Are you saying with 6 or 7 layers you have to render? Also I have read where the output to the breakout box is not full resolution so what does that mean?