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At NAB 2004, DMN's Charlie White speaks with Hiro Yamada, Chairman & Founder of Canopus Corporation, about the company's latest digital video editing products, including the company's newest offering, Edius HD. Yamada also has comments about the new HDV format, his company's support of Adobe Premiere Pro and more. The outspoken chairman also talks about the growing popularity of HDTV as it relates to various market segments, and the upcoming onslaught of HDTV demand from China in this exclusive DMN interview.
DMN: The big story at NAB this year is high definition. Tell us about your new product that addresses this market.
Yamada: We have been working on Edius, an HD editing system for two or three years. After we released a DV editing system, we were thinking about our next target -- HD. And the minute we started designing that system, we had to depend on a hardware design for the codec, transitions, everything. Finally, we realized that the CPUs were going faster and faster, and that we could make our hardware very simple and try to do everything in software, similar to what we did with DV editing. So we're very proud of our HD editing system. We started shipping this unit in Japan in February. So far, we've shipped more than 14 units in Japan, to several broadcasting stations and smaller editing studios.
DMN: I noticed that you're concentrating on Edius now, and I also saw on the show floor, you're talking about Premiere Pro, and the HD version as well, but that is a technology demonstration. Now does this say that maybe you're going to be going with Edius more than Premiere? You're still friends with Adobe, right?
Yamada: This point is very clear. We believe that Edius and Premiere can live together, because Edius is well-tuned software, targeting professional editors. They don't need fancy functions. But what they need is very selective functionality. And we've targeted them, focusing on this simple and basic functionality in Edius, to make everything real-time and reliable. But on the other hand, some people need some details, enhancements and some kinds of fancy transitions. In this case, they have to use Premiere. So Premiere and Edius -- what we have to do is support both, always.
DMN: Your company, based in Japan, has about 400 employees, right?
Yamada: Worldwide, not 400, we have about 300. 200 in Japan, and 100 all over the world.
DMN: For that many employees, it looks to me like you're doing a lot of software development, and hardware development, too. Didn't you just hire a new group of 50 software engineers a couple of years ago?
Yamada: Not 50. Tell you the truth, this HD editing system, the whole hardware design was done by only four people. And for the software side, we had about 25, including the people writing the drivers. That's it. And, at the same time, they had to work on the standard Edius and they had to work on Premiere plug-ins. So this is the team working on our video editing systems.
DMN: Can you tell us how you got all this bandwidth? How did you squeeze this figurative basketball through the garden hose to do HD? It seems like there's a sudden leap in bandwidth here. How did that happen?
Yamada: Because we have been working on codec technology for more than 10 years. We released a motion JPEG codec long ago, and when we showed our codec to Bill Gates when he came to Japan, for example, he was completely impressed. So we have technology for encoding and decoding by software, and at the same time we work with hardware also. So we know what gives us the best performance, and best quality, and best balance to make a system using encoding and decoding. This is a key technology. It enables us to produce this HD editing system at such a low price in such a short time.
DMN: One of your people told me that Canopus is now looking more toward broadcasters and the broadcast market, where before you weren't necessarily serving the broadcast market. Does this signal a difference in your direction as a company?
Yamada: We are trying to expand both ways, up and down, and horizontally -- everywhere. We are targeting for HD editing, in broadcasting stations. That's the reason we have to go to the high-end market. But at the same time, HDV, the new camcorders coming out that support high resolution -- this is a consumer product. So we can have a similar type of customer that we have now. This is a very important group of customers for us. And also, for the low end, we didn't touch the low-end market very much, but now we've just released Let's Edit low-end editing software -- very simple-to-use software. It's almost the same as Storm Edit.
DMN: I liked that application, Storm Edit. It's really quick, you can do cuts-only with very low overhead. And maybe that's the same idea that you're carrying forth with Edius as well?
Yamada: Yes, we're trying to expand our markets. A good thing is, we already have a hardware codec, a software codec, one is Let's Edit for low-end, and one is Edius, for the high end, so we combine this kind of application and hardware, to target each market.
DMN: You're expanding not only with the editing market, but with other applications as well. Can you tell us about those?
Yamada: We believe we can offer a total solution for customers. When people edit video, they have to encode to different types of formats for distribution. When they encode and compress later, they want to distribute using a network. Why don't we offer all the solutions for this market? So we're offering editing and encoding and distribution. And sometimes when they edit video, sometimes they deal with still images. So why don't we have Imaginate? That's the reason we have this wide range. Someone said that Canopus has too many product names. I don't think so. We need them, to offer a total solution for our customers.
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