EX1 Editing Platform
 

Next month I will be getting an EX-1. I am still undecided on what platform to edit on. I desire native editing (no transcoding) and real-time viewing on an HD-TV. I am researching Premiere CS4 with intensity pro card output and Edius 5 with HDspark card output. Either one fits the high-end of my budget. Does anyone have any experience or opinions on these choices?

Thanks....

My experience has been that Edius 5 is very stable and, from my own experience, probably the most efficient and stable NL editor for HD in its price range. This conclusion is based on comparing performance on the same MacPro with FCP, Vegas 8 and PP2. My understanding, based on collegues who have a PP system, is that to get anything like a similar performance with PP, you will need to add the Matrox RTX2; I also get the impression that the current PP is less stable than Edius, but no doubt other users will be able to advise you on that.

CS3/WinXP here until Adobe releases PP 4.1, but I have few qualms about it's ability/stability editing native EXx footage. No special cards required on my 2+ yo PC (other than NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500) for real-time performance. Perhaps a card would assist RT playback when stacking effects.

Will likely move to Vista with the CS4 upgrade.

Oh, and native EX editing was not available with PP2.

Bill
www.treehousemedia.net

Have you considered Vegas?

I use Premiere CS3 together with the Matrox RTX2 card and can import and edit all the clips without any problems. It is very fast. The ChromaKey function is excellent too, it works in real time, i.e. instant.

Does Vegas offer true real time out through HDMI? Or is it preview? I know Edius is 100% real RT full raster out through HDMI. Don't know about Premiere as I jumped off that unstable ship years ago.

So Mike, if you "don't know about Premiere" (Pro), why do you feel compelled to discredit it? I would not have considered the Premiere of old either, but to make remarks that reflect poorly on Premiere Pro based upon outdated information is not constructive (unless you have personal working knowledge of a recent version, then you can complain :-)).

I'm sure Edius is a fine program.

That's why I said I didn't know about Premiere. Years ago it was unstable. Haven't tried it since Pro 1.5 which was also unstable.
So, is it stable and really RT now or is it still preview only?

Moved from the PC platform in 2002, in order to operate FCp 3.
Been using ever since and not looked back.
FCP studio is a dream suite.
Just my 2 cents worth.

I produce a one-hour fishing show on an Intel Mac Pro. Includes compositing with After Effects and the entire show is color corrected and graded with Apple's Color.

I was using a 2.5 GHz G5 but rendering in Color would have taken way too long. The Intel Mac made it a practical process. Same with AE.

You could try NewTek SpeedEdit v1.5.5.
It reads native MP4 files from the EX1/EX3, has exellent color grading tools and works even on computers that are older than 2 months.

Don't know about Edius 5.x but I do know that Edius v4.6 has limitations (no 1080p25, no full range output formats, no output support for the freeware HuffYUV codec) and their jpg2000 (Infinity) ingest tool is not as nice as the EX ingest tool from Sony.

A very long time ago I worked with Premiere and found some of their poststamp size previews difficult to work with.

Best to try different applications before you buy.