Setting Up

CANOPUS EDIUS 4 REVIEW

Setting Up

Edius Running On Twin Screens

Edius can run on a single screen but we are fortunate enough to be able to run it on twin screens. Once you have it open you can customize the layout to how you would like it and save that setting, or you can go back to the default layout with a few clicks of the mouse. We did try running it on one screen too, but you can't beat the convenience of ample desk space over twins.

One Long Timeline Over Two Screens

Two Screens With TV Out Option

Canopus does offer its own add on cards to enable input and output of signals, as well as the normal fire wire ports, but we had a NIVIDIA Quadro FX 560 PCIx card that we setup with Edius to give us twin screens and S-video out to a TV. It also had component and DVI out, so one could even feed it to a HDTV etc. We use one port on the card to drive the first LCD screen. The computer's motherboard had its own onboard 128 meg graphics port built in, so we fed the second LCD screen to that, and then that allowed us one more port on the Quadro card to feed out to the TV. This setup works really well!

Canopus recommends at least a 3 GIG HT processor for HDV as the minimum, along with a heap of ram and at least 128 megs on the graphics card. The more powerful the PC is, the more Edius can do. We were using a 3GIG PC with 2 GIGS of ram and 4 SATA drives plugged straight into the motherboard. It also had one normal IDE system drive and I have been informed that the Edius performance is twice as powerful when using a Intel® Core2 Duo processor.

You do need lots of space if you are editing HDV, as the Canopus HQ codec takes up about 28 + GIGS per hour of footage and having your drives set up as RAIDs would be a good option, although we just left our 4 SATA drives as big single drives.

I hand built the PC so all the junk software they load onto PCs now days was not there, and you have to make sure you turn any anti virus software off and just have Edius running and nothing else. I have suggested a few basic tricks to give your PC more power to Edit with, but do it at your own risk.....

Go start / run and type in msconfig and turn all programs off and reboot.

Get into your system properties and turn off windows system restore and shut down auto updates.

Get into your display properties and click on adjust for best performance. You get up to 10% more power as that is how much power it takes to drive all those fancy 3D XP graphics.

There is so much more you can do along with this....Go ahead and Google it!