Grass targets rival NLE users

Grass Valley has unveiled a special competitive upgrade promotion, which means users of Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and Avid’s Media Composer can now upgrade to its EDIUS 6 NLE for just $399 (half price effectively). And a statement supporting the initiative is more than happy to put the boot into FCP X.

“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,” it says. “For example, the latest version of EDIUS (version 6.05, distributed free of charge to registered version 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 & 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 version 6.02. Users will be able to enjoy faster than real-time encoding of videos for iPhone, Play Station Portable, as well as H.264/AVC videos up to 1920x1080p50/60.