Half-price Edius aims for Final Cut

Grass Valley is aiming for dissatisfied Final Cut users, as well as owners of Adobe Premiere and Avid Media Composer, with a half-price competitive upgrade to the latest version of its Edius HD editing software.

It will sell the Edius 6 non-linear editing software for €299 ($399), until the end of the year, to users of its main competing systems.

“This activity is being sparked by Apple's recent dramatic changes to the Final Cut editing product, but we thought that Avid and Adobe customers should benefit too,” said Charlie Dunn, Executive Vice President of Products for Grass Valley.

“We’re committed to the professional production marketplace for the long term and will continue to advance the program’s many capabilities for the benefit of our customers, and anyone that wants to produce high-quality content faster and more efficiently.”

Edius only runs under Windows, which would mean that FCP users would have to, at least, buy and install the Microsoft operating system on their Macs (unless they buy completely new Windows hardware), but there has been a lot of criticism from broadcast users of Apple's rebuilt NLE, and, despite a recent upgrade to FCP X that addressed some concerns, rival manufacturers have spotted an opportunity to gain market share from Apple's best-selling NLE.

The latest version of Edius (version 6.05) brings new video file formats and hardware-assisted H.264 encoding. It also supports both 50p and 60p file import, allowing for a smoother workflow within Edius 6.

For users of Intel’s Second Generation Core Processor, Edius has extended support for Quick Sync Video Hardware H.264 video encoding of MP4 files to complement the AVCHD acceleration introduced in version 6.02. Users will gain faster than real time encoding of videos for iPhone, Play Station Portable, as well as H.264/AVC videos up to 1920x1080p50/60.

By David Fox