Canopus / Grass Valley

Canopus, now a part of the Thomson/Grass Valley group, offers a complete line of video capture and editing solutions to customers in 55 countries, through its headquarters in Kobe, Japan and sales offices in Australia, China, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the USA.

EDIUS Neo 3 gives users the ability to work with a wide variety of video formats up to 1080p50/60 resolution. Based on the new Grass Valley EDIUS® 6 NLE software, EDIUS Neo 3 allows editors to focus on being creative without having to wait for effects and transitions to be rendered. EDIUS Neo 3 has the fastest native AVCHD editing capability in the industry; perfect for editing video content captured with digital SLR cameras, such as the Canon EOS, as well as additional AVCHD video cameras. EDIUS Neo 3 requires no transcoding, even when different compression formats and image resolutions are mixed on the timeline New features include 3D Layouter, a tool for managing 3D digital effects, an audio mixer, full-screen preview and motion menus for DVD and Blu-ray Disc production.

EDIUS 6 offers an unparalleled support of formats including the newer file-based formats JPEG 2000, XDCAM and XDCAM EX, P2 (DVCPRO and AVC-Intra), AVCCAM, AVC-HD and GFCAM. It can run under XP, Vista or Windows 7 whilst retaining it's class-leading real-time, mixed format support - even on the same timeline. The software offers numerous speed and functionality improvements from earlier versions and includes an impressive bundle of 3rd party software applications

What we're about . . .      ZEN is not a traditional Audio-Visual dealer who started selling computers, nor is it a computer shop that also sells video editing systems. You won't get any salesmen giving you the "hard-sell" when you call, just straightforward advice and information - which for some callers is the knowledge that they don't need to buy whatever it is they thought they needed! Above all you'll be dealing with someone with a wide range of experience and knowledge of both PCs and video production. We're not the biggest, nor necessarily the cheapest, but we are one of the longest established computer/video specialists in the UK.

Company history . . .      ZEN was started in the 1980s by Martin Kay, then working for ITV at Granada's Manchester studios, who built his first 6502-based computer in 1979 from an Ohio Scientific kit, bought in the USA whilst working as a Sound Recordist on a film shoot for World In Action. With the advent of the Amiga, which could be gen-locked to a video source, Martin started writing a variety of video-related software. This included subtitling & tele-prompting, ident clocks, scoring software for sports & gameshows, and specialist software to mimic other computer displays for use in TV film dramas like Cracker, Prime Suspect and A Touch of Frost. Martin left Granada in 1993 to concentrate on his computer-video activities with ZEN, following a natural path into non-linear editing systems, now the main focus of the business, although he still maintains an active interest in video production.