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For those of you who are new to Canopus products, Edius 1.5 is the long-awaited enhancement of the RexEdit and StormEdit NLE products. When I reviewed RexEdit in 1999, I arrived at two conclusions. First: "RexEdit's human interface was inadequately implemented. For example: the Bin window does not auto-scroll when one tries to drag a clip to a new position; a clip can't be renamed; clips in the Timeline have neither images nor names; transitions have no symbol or name; and in the Timeline or Bin, one cannot select more than one clip prior to a delete, cut, copy, or paste." Second: "I really loved editing with RexEdit because it was both intuitive and unbelievably fast. Most operations were performed instantly!" My final evaluation of RexEdit: "currently primitive, but very, very fast."
In 2001, The arrival of the Canopus DVStorm lowered the cost of multi-stream realtime editing. And with DVStorm, RexEdit became StormEdit. Canopus then in 2002 decided to package many of its products into a single bundle called DVStorm2. This bundle includes Canopus DV Capture (single-pass scene detection), Canopus Xplode (2D and 3D effects), Canopus 3DRT-II (3D DVE effects), Canopus MediaCruise (realtime MPEG capture), and the Canopus SoftMPG Encoder that creates MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 streams directly from StormEdit. Also included in the DVStorm2 bundle: MpegExplorer, MpegCutter, MpegAVSplitter, and MpegRe-encoder. For slightly faster MPEG encoding you could add the StormEncoder to the DVStorm2 package.
Editing speed has always been a prime virtue of Canopus products. With enough computing power and adequate disk bandwidth, a DVStorm2 supported up to five simultaneous realtime DV video tracks. Of course, the number and complexity of realtime effects that can be applied to these tracks is limited by the total amount of CPU power remaining after DV decompression tasks.
At that time, StormEdit also supported Xplode 3D Alpha Vapor Dissolves, Xplode 3D Objects, and Xplode 3D Alpha Wipes. The NLE also enabled access to realtime 3D Picture-in-Picture plus Pan and Zoom as well as seven realtime audio filters.
While all these capabilities were great to use, installation required you to load 18 software...