Grass Valley adds 3D support through its Edius and Storm 3G editing tools

Grass Valley has announced native support for 3D movie creation thanks to an update to its Edius editing software that will provide the Storm 3G and Storm 3G Elite editing platforms with this new feature.

Grass Valley has unveiled a set of 3D tools for its Edius multi-format non-linear editing software and added 3D support for peripheral editing that provides users with a complete stereoscopic 3D post-production workflow. The Storm 3G and Storm 3G Elite editing platforms are supported via the Edius timeline with stereoscopic 3D I/O via a single 3G SDI source and/or dual 3G SDI signals.

A trial version (30 days) of Edius with 3D support will be available online in early December for free download.

The new support includes native support for 3D video clips captured with the 3D camera; clip pairing to synchronize clips from both the left and right eyes; 2D to 3D material conversion capability, and a series of timeline tools to make necessary 3D adjustments to compensate for errors in broadcasting (no need for transcoding). Previous Edius features available in 2D are also supported in 3D, such as real-time color correction, keying, transitions and multi-camera editing.

Charlie Dunn, executive vice president of Products at Grass Valley, acknowledged that the company has seen "increased interest in 3D editing and production tools and customers have been asking for easy-to-use tools within Edius to help them complete projects quickly and cost-effectively. Edius has always been a flexible and highly affordable platform and the product continues to grow and improve every day. Now anyone working with Edius can instantly add 3D post-production capability to their arsenal of production tools and generate new revenue by expanding." of its customer base.”

New set of tools

Also included in the preview version are tools to import, organize and adjust 3D videos in the most efficient way. And it's all done in the same Edius multi-format timeline that 2D projects use, making the process just as easy to complete in 3D as it is in 2D.

Grass Valley has also included tight integration with its K2 media servers, so its K2 ChannelFlex technology (a software application within Grass Valley's AppCenter Elite software suite) allows all K2 Summit and K2 Solo K2 servers to go from handling four streams of SD/HD video to eight streams in specific applications, such as super slow motion, multi-camera recording and 3D production.

In fact, with a simple software upgrade, every K2 Summit production client and every K2 Solo HD/SD server can now be used as a 3D production server for 3D recording or playback, a 2X or 3X super slow motion recording device, or as a server for simultaneous recording of 2 to 6 camera angles with at least one channel for playback.