Grass Valley Reveals Format-Independent EDIUS Turnkey Products

Thomson Accelerates Canopus Integration with Enhanced Editing Technology, Built-in REV PRO Drive and Early Adoption for K2 Share

The Grass Valley division within Thomson is to accelerate integration of its recently acquired Canopus division with a range of four Grass Valley EDIUS turnkey editing workstations. The new systems come as Grass Valley announced availability of dedicated hardware for the EDIUS v4 nonlinear editor and the introduction of K2 EDIUS Share networked editing solution.

"Grass Valley is dedicated to the continued development and advancement of the EDIUS NLE platform from Canopus as part of its comprehensive broadcast technology range," says Marc Valentin, president of the Grass Valley business within Thomson. "The new turnkey products in particular represent a significant step in aligning our technologies to drive further workflow efficiencies throughout the broadcast chain."

Grass Valley is to introduce EDIUS HD, EDIUS HDLE, EDIUS NX, and EDIUS SP and turnkey editing workstations for format-independent craft editing, the first Canopus-origin products to be available through the Grass Valley sales channel. At the heart of each is a combination of high-performance hardware and NLE software, offering the most comprehensive support for native HDV editing in the industry, supporting 1080/24P, 1080/25P, 1080/50i, 720/24P and 720/25P formats.

The EDIUS hardware and software work together to provide a realtime editing experience, without rendering, combining different video formats, multiple layers and complex nested sequences. The package includes its own dedicated hardware based on a high-powered PC, internal storage, an integrated REV PROÃ¢Â„Â¢ removable media drive and a bundle of REV PRO media.

The EDIUS HD turnkey workstation is Grass Valley's flagship editor for professional video production environments using any analogue, SD or HD digital production workflow. Its multi-I/O processor design includes SDI and component video inputs, AES/EBU digital audio and balanced analogue audio support, RS-422 device control, and SD and HD component outputs.

EDIUS NX is a cost-effective platform for any workflow, designed for DV and HDV. The EDIUS NX workstation makes transitioning between SD and HD workflows affordable for production facilities of any size. Easily upgradeable, ideal as a standalone option or interoperable with other EDIUS turnkey systems, EDIUS NX is a powerful, affordable craft editor.

The EDIUS HDLE workstation is perfect for facilities that have not yet made the move to HD-SDI production but expect to do so in the future. Featuring an upgradeable hardware platform, it allows work in SD-SDI with planned progression to HD-SDI. It includes a professional multi-I/O processor box with SDI component video input, AES/EBU digital audio, balanced analogue audio, RS-422 device control and both SD and HD component output.

Meanwhile, the EDIUS SP workstation is designed for daily production with the convenience of professional-level analogue ingest from equipment such as Betacam SP decks. In an EDIUS production environment, this system can double as an analogue ingest station and as a highly capable realtime editing workstation. With the ability to mix SD and HD content, the EDIUS SP platform is also the perfect transition from SD to HD production.

New Hardware
EDIUS v4's hardware accelerates its software's key features such as multicam support, nested sequence editing and alpha-channel support in the HQ codec, with direct input/output capabilities and improved line-scaling.

With the EDIUS v4 software launched at NAB2006, the complementary hardware creates the complete, packaged non-linear editing solution. It also includes a broadcast-standard character generator from Inscriber and superior codecs that prevent image degradation even after multiple renderings.

Accelerated K2 Share
The K2 EDIUS Share SAN with fibre channel storage marks the interoperability of EDIUS and the Grass Valley K2 media server, and brings new levels of price performance and workflow efficiencies to broadcast post-production environments. Supporting all broadcast formats and a wide choice of codecs to eliminate transcoding, K2 EDIUS Share is the ideal solution for networked SD and HD production.
The high-performance, end-to-end solution uses high bandwidth, shared storage for efficient shared workflow and has already been adopted by broadcasters in the Asia-Pacific region. This collaborative workgroup system enables multiple EDIUS craft editors to share SD and HD content stored on the K2 server and seamlessly collaborate on specific clips or entire projects. It eliminates transcoding as users search for, store and manage assets across different departments.
The solution also offers the ability to edit while capturing and HD multi-stream realtime editing on multiple clients. It supports proxy browsing, and is fully compatible with all popular automation systems.

In line with Grass Valley's format-flexible approach the multi-format architecture of the K2 systems integrates multiple editors such as EDIUS and Aurora. EDIUS and K2 platforms handle MPEG, IMX, DVCPRO and HD-MPEG natively.