System, hardware & pricing
In-deep’s Edius SP system centres on a Supermicro twin Xeon motherboard (X6Da8-G) and has twin 3.2GHz Intel Xeon processors and 2GByte RAM, plus three 250GByte Sata hard disks raided together to behave as a single 750GByte drive.On top of that, there’s a lovely Inno 3D nVidia GeForce 6600 PCI Express graphics card with 256MByte and not one or even two DVD burners but three of them – multi-format Sonys with support for double layer DVD+R media.
And it’s all housed in a very impressive Cooler Master CM Stacker case with space for up to ten media drives, and powered by a 650W PSU. This beast of a machine will cost you £4,163 including VAT (£3,543 ex VAT) and the addition of Canopus’s hardware brings the bottom line to £6,545.
Had the system been built around Edius NX with the HDV option, it would have cost £5,392. These prices also include speakers and a pair of 19in LCD monitors - none of which we tested. There’s also a three-year courier collect-and-return warranty. In addition to the system price, In-deep offer on-site installation for a further £116, and a day’s training one month later for £294.
The heavy-duty Supermicro 650W power supply does a good job of announcing its presence when the system is turned on, with a sound loud enough to scare the cat but insignificant in comparison to fast spin on our Zanussi. Washing machine that is. Once the PC has booted up, the noise subsides and the system becomes surprisingly quiet.
The Cooler Master case is well ventilated and seemed to live up to its branding. The front is beautifully designed to accommodate up to ten 5.25in drives, and has a panel offering six USB 2.0 sockets, a single six-pin FireWire port, and 3.5mm jack points for headphones and microphones. The motherboard’s onboard audio is used but this doesn’t offer surround sound and is a compromise we'd not have made if buying such a system just to save a few quid.
Connections for the Edius SP board are located round the back of the system. There’s a four-pin OHCI FireWire port for DV and HDV capture, plus a thick multi-core bundle of cables for channelling S-video, composite and component video, as well as balanced and unbalanced analogue audio. Component output channels are round the back, too, on a separate plate. For some editors, the supplied connections may be absolutely fine, but many will want to have the cabling more accessible. In this case, an Edius SP breakout box is available for a far-from-charitable £410.
The Canopus software bundle features Edius Pro 3, as well as an MPEG capture program and a video export applet. There’s also Quick Titler for titling, and ProCoder Express for media encoding from Edius’s timeline. In addition to Canopus’s own software, the system comes with a lite version of Ulead’s highly-respected authoring package DVD Workshop 2, plus CyberLink’s software DVD player for high-quality playback of MPEG files. Nero 6 was also installed by In-deep, allowing files and disc images to be burned to the system’s three burners simultaneously.
