The reputation of Grass Valley (formerly Canopus) for rock-solid, well-designed video editing tools is second to none. But it's a reputation that has been earned more through the company's hardware development than its software.
That's not to say that Grass Valley makes poor software - far from it - but somehow it's easier for them to market realtime boards and graphics accelerators than editing interfaces and encoders. Edius, therefore, seems to be enjoying only niche market success.
After a slightly tepid reception on its initial release, the development team did some extensive and worthwhile research for version 4, to make it a very strong competitor to the likes of Premiere Pro and Liquid.
Version 4.5 is, apparently, a minor update for Edius Pro, and available as a free download for registered users of Edius 4. Beneath the hood, however, you'll find an extensive rebuild and a great host of new features - most of which aren't even mentioned in the manuals!
Changes in Edius 4.5 are evident straight away - from the new desktop icon, to a new interface for launching old projects or starting new ones. The choice of project presets is more sensible and intuitive than before with easily accessible settings for high and standard definition video formats.
Once into the main interface, we find that everything appears brighter and friendlier, with a redesigned interface which is altogether more punchy and visual.
There's also a comprehensive panel for customising the main user interface, assigning buttons, tweaking playback controls and overlay options, and setting keyboard shortcuts. Window layout and even timeline and render settings can be tweaked. Once set up, all the above adjustments can be saved as a template for future use.
Edius' core workflow remains unchanged - so there's no new learning curve for existing users - and even newcomers with some experience in prosumer-level editing software will feel right at home with its visual approach to three-point editing, using source and edit monitors (or a single monitor toggled between the two functions).
In our tests, Edius proved itself to be very fast and responsive, unlike many other programs that take time to stop and think about each command when projects get complicated.
Overall performance for DV format work was superb on a 3GHz dual core system, giving the type of real-time playback that we would once only expect from expensive hardware acceleration.
