Let’s face it – software is seductive. Many years ago the mother of my then girlfriend reminded me that “half the fun of getting a present is unwrapping it” (she was very liberal minded) and so it is with software...

I’ve been faithful to Ms Vegas for ten years now – a long time in the scheme of things. She’s lively and responsive and we have had some great times together. It hasn’t all been plain sailing, but then no worthwhile relationship is! So would I stray to another ‘interesting package’? Until recently it was a firm ‘No way’. Then a mate called Redgum started raving about this really hot Ms Edius – she was everything a bloke could need, and then some. I’ll admit I was curious, I mean I still cherished Ms Vegas but ten years is a long time and if what Redgum said was true...

Then another mate, The Hague, offered to buy me some time with Ms Edius. He even offered to share her round with a few of us. What’s a bloke to say? Look, it’s just a fling, it doesn’t really mean anything. I’ll just be out of town for a few days, Ms Vegas...

So there I was, gently removing the cellophane wrapper from this newly delivered package. I admit it was exciting... [Dear Reader, in the interests of propriety, I’ll forgo the rest of this metaphor and get on with the review]

You see, the end game is always the same. You want to take your raw footage and emerge with a beautiful piece of video. The NLE is how you get there, and like lovers, they all have their quirks and foibles. [Stop it, David, get on with the comparison]

David Hague asked a few of us to try out Edius 6, the latest software NLE from Grass Valley. David was keen that we should be new to Edius in order to see what kind of experience it would be for a ‘newbie’. I certainly qualified in those terms: I’ve been using Sony Vegas almost exclusively for ten years and so I’m very unfamiliar with other brands on offer.

I did start out using Premiere 6 years ago, but it was really difficult to work with due to random crashes and so on, so I switched to Media Studio Pro which was much more stable and actually had some very advanced features like rotoscoping and 3D titling. I’ve also watched editors in Macworld working with Final Cut Pro. But, for me, Vegas just meshed nicely with my brainspace and has allowed me to be very productive over many years.

Getting to know Ms Edius

Edius installed quickly with its little green dongle in place and from the outset impressed me with its fluidity and responsiveness. [Don’t go near the metaphor, David!] The interface is clean, although to me very unfamiliar. As Ronald Reagan might have said, “What does this button do?” I like the way the various panes snap to each other and I especially like the totally smooth playback of .m2t clips.

Figures 2 and 3 show typical layouts for Edius 6 and Vegas Pro 10

I didn’t really have much of a clue as to how to get started, being totally unfamiliar with this editing paradigm, so I checked out the Help file. That took a while because there are 1,078 pages of it!!

I noticed that my Shuttle Pro worked immediately and there was a certain ‘reliability’ already apparent which was appealing.

Now, inevitably, with a program as unfamiliar as this, I was bound to get some things wrong, but I found myself actually fretting a bit because the timeline was so fundamentally different to what I’m used to in Vegas. In Vegas, so much happens at the timeline level, but in Edius the tracks are fairly constrained. It’s difficult to explain, but in Edius I think you’re meant to focus on the player and recorder windows and therefore there’s not much information in the block-like representations of the clips themselves on the timeline. In Vegas the height and width of the tracks is very flexible and buttons for FX, Track Motion are available in each track header and in each clip. Given that you can see the full detail of the clips in the track itself, my focus tends to be on the clips themselves. I hadn’t realised this until I spent some time working in Edius, although I’ve observed that most other NLEs use the Edius paradigm. Vegas is the odd one out, and I think it’s one of the reasons I’ve found it so efficient to use.

This is most apparent on the audio side of things. In Edius, with an audio track expanded, you can see the waveform, but you can’t magnify it beyond a single frame. This would make synching extremely difficult if not impossible, unless there’s some trick I’m not aware of. By contrast, in Vegas, you can expand the audio track to the sample level and you can increase the height of the track to the full height of the monitor if you want to! This single difference really counts for me because I love the degree of audio control that is so easily available in Vegas.

Figure 3

 Figure 3 shows precisely what I mean: the audio in Edius (on the left) is expanded both horizontally and vertically as far as they will go. There is simply no comparison when you look at the Vegas display on the right. There’s no trickery here, both programs are opened on the same computer and displayed on the same monitor. In this respect Vegas wins hands down!

It took me a while to figure out how to apply effects and in this respect Edius is very different. In fact I have this subjective impression that the huge power of this program is clearly there, but just a couple of layers down compared to Vegas. I liken this to the difference between graphics packages such as Photoshop, or Illustrator and Xara Design Pro which I now use all the time. Xara does very powerful things faster and with fewer keystrokes than the Adobe products and once you understand how Xara operates it really flies.

One interesting aspect of Edius’s workflow is that it is based on “sequences” which are a bit like chapters in a book or verses in a piece of music. You can easily re-order the project by moving the sequences about and this is very similar to the way I work with MIDI clips in ACID or Reason, so it’s a very familiar and attractive model.  

I tried rendering out my project and although it worked, the quality was awful. Back to the manual and I discovered some more settings options that produced perfect renders. Nothing wrong with Edius – I was just climbing that communications tower...

One problem I couldn’t solve related to using dual monitors. Edius certainly works beautifully on a dual monitor system with this one exception – I moved the help file pane to the second monitor and Edius froze. After a restart it did the same thing. My two monitors are connected through a physical HDMI switch so I can swap the display between two computers. I found that if I did switch while in dual monitor mode Edius would fire a nasty message and ask to be restarted. That doesn’t happen with Vegas and while not a major concern it would mean I’d have to be careful to avoid switching during a session.

As supplied, Edius 6 came with an excellent suite of bonus plugins, notably the full VST and mastering suite from iZotope and powerful offerings from ProDad (VitaScene and Mercalli) and NewBlue (Video Essentials for Edius). I have these plugins in Vegas Pro and they’re superb. Edius comes with its own “Simple Titler” and I have to say it’s great. It includes a wide range of preset styles, all customizable, and also features simple but effective drawing tools making it extremely easy to include animatable shapes, lines and so on. You enter text in a very low-res mode and you have to render it by pressing a Preview button before seeing it at project resolution. That process is almost instantaneous and therefore not an issue.  I like this Simple Titler a lot – the Titler in Vegas could learn a few tricks here (although the Vegas Titler can do some tricks that Edius can’t). [No, David, don’t hark back to the metaphor...]

The final step in any project is exporting and Edius is very well equipped to handle just about any format whether you’re printing to tape, exporting to a file, or burning a DVD. I should add that Edius, like Vegas, is pretty much format agnostic meaning that almost any file type will play back instantly on the timeline without pre-rendering. Having been frustrated while watching editors working with Adobe NLEs and Final Cut Pro where pre-rendering is mandatory, Edius has definitely got this right. I understand that Adobe CS5 will do the same, but look at the hardware specs required to achieve it. As I write, I’m using Edius and Vegas on my old Quad core Q6600 with 3GB RAM and they both work beautifully (yes, I do want a new i7, 64-bit with 12GB RAM, but I haven’t shelled out yet).

Rendering in Edius was fairly fast – better than real-time – taking 13 minutes to render a 19 minute clip to .m2t. On the same computer, Vegas rendered the same 19 minute file to .m2t in 4min 55sec which was significantly faster because Vegas used smart rendering to avoid recompression.

I finished my testing by trying to learn how to burn a DVD in Edius. Initially I couldn’t figure out how to do it – the wizard was only offering me a BluRay option and I don’t have a BluRay burner. Finally I discovered the answer in the style tab where I was able to select either DVD or BD. The build and burn process was slick and fast and produced a good quality DVD.

What really impressed me was the excellent range of DVD style templates available. These are really classy designs and because you can tweak them, they provide a great starting point for the look and feel of your DVD. They are much better than the templates in DVD Architect. I suspect, however, that building a complex menu-based DVD will be easier in DVD Architect than in Edius. I may well be wrong here, but I found the tools available for menu building in Edius to be a bit light on. Very possibly there are tools available that I haven’t found yet, but that in itself is a drawback – the options should be obvious, not buried too far below the surface.

Will I ask Ms Edius out again?

Ms Edius is a classy piece, no doubt about it. She moves well and delivers the goods. I guess she’s just a bit conservative for my tastes and although she has some features to die for (technical specs, Titler, DVD templates) she’s a bit straight-laced (especially in the audio department). I really like the fact that Ms Vegas is more of a free spirit, perfectly happy living life in the fast lane, so while I’ll definitely avail myself of some of Ms Edius’s talents in the future, the whole experience has re-affirmed my relationship with Ms Vegas because, even after ten years, she still does it for me best.

[Couldn’t help yourself, could you David? Eeeesh!]

By David Smith

Dr David Smith is a physiologist-turned-film maker. David was Associate Producer of the IMAX feature Australia Land Beyond Time and was Senior Researcher on the ABC TV series Nature of Australia. He wrote and hosted David Smith's Earthwatch on ABCTV and was 'resident zoologist' on the Don Lane and Bert Newton Shows.

In 1987 David set up his company, imaginACTION pty ltd (www.imaginaction.net.au) and has sinced written, directed and/or filmed numerous documentaries and educational multimedia projects. He has also written six books, including two Penguin eco-thrillers. Over the past five years David has moved towards medical and health-related projects, including trauma surgery, schizophrenia and emergency medicine.

David is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and a professional member of the AFI and has always been keen to share his knowledge, especially with young budding film makers. David can be contacted at david@imaginaction.net.au.