Grass Valley Slashes Price on Edius HD Editing Software

SAN FRANCISCO: Grass Valley has announced that, as part of a special competitive upgrade promotion, users of Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and Avid’s Media Composer can now upgrade to Edius 6 nonlinear editing program for $399, 50 percent off the regular price.

Thanks to the new promotion, which is only available through the end of this year, users upgrading can enjoy all of the real-time signal processing and multiformat support (on the same timeline) of the EDIUS system’s suite of professional tools.

While many current users believe Apple is apparently moving away from the professional video industry with FCP X, Grass Valley continues to add the features and functionality that pros need most. For example, the latest version of EDIUS (vers. 6.05, distributed free of charge to registered vers. 6.0 users from the Grass Valley driver download page), brings new video file formats and hardware-assisted H.264 encoding, This latest update also supports both 50p and 60p file import, allowing for a smoother workflow within EDIUS 6.

“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.”

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 Edius 6 vers. 6.02. Users will be able to enjoy faster than real-time encoding of videos for iPhone, PlayStation Portable, as well as H.264/AVC videos up to 1920x1080p50/60.

This special $399 (€299) cross-grade program, including third-party software, is only available through Dec. 31, 2011.