New Formats, Third-Party Hardware Support Added to Native 64-Bit NLE

Grass Valley is now shipping Edius 7, adding third-party hardware support and native 64-bit code to the latest iteration of its NLE for Windows 7 and 8.

In addition to Grass Valley hardware (Storm, HDStorm, and HDSpark), Edius supports hardware from Blackmagic Design (Decklink, Intensity Pro, and UltraStudio) with playout support enabled for the Matrox MXO2 LE (input support is scheduled to be added by year's end). Grass says support for AJA hardware should be added later this year.

File formats added to Edius 7 include Canon's 4K M-JPEG, AVCHD 2.0, and Sony XAVC. Support for up-and-coming formats, such as new flavors of Panasonic's AVC Ultra and XAVC long-GOP and XAVC S, are slated for addition to Edius once cameras using them become available.

The multicam feature in Edius supports editing from up to 16 different sources simultaneously.

Outside of the big three (from Adobe, Apple, and Avid), Edius is one of the more widely used alternative NLEs, especially in broadcast news. Edius is promoted as a good system for fast-turnaround environments, owing partly to its support for resolutions ranging all the way up to 4K (via Blackmagic Design's Decklink 4K Extreme) and real-time frame-rate conversion on the timeline. The new version can address up to 512 GB of RAM in Windows 8, and is designed to take advantage of multicore and Intel Core i CPUs.

Edius Pro is aimed at standalone users, while Edius Elite is designed for networked production environments and includes K2 media server and Stratus connectivity. A 31-day trial version is available at the product website. 

Finally, Edius Pro 7 is 64-bit only. If you need a version of Edius to run on a 32-bit Windows box, you'd better get Edius Pro 6.5 while Grass Valley still offers it.