Got any question you want me to put to Canopus's chairman and founder Hiro Yamada?

I would like to know (in no particular order)
1) what Canopus's plans are for their DVStorm Premiere Pro plug in, and whether they ever intend to produce one which works as advertised. Even their US Tech Support Manager admits the Premiere Pro plug-in is so buggy as to be unusable for many people's editing styles.
2) Why AC3 encoding in not included in Procoder.
3) Why Canopus never communicates with its customers, and whyCanopus does not provide a means to feedback to them about its products. There is, for example, no way to formally report a bug or make a feature request.
4) When Canopus is going to fix the (few but acknowleded and widespread) bugs in Edius rather than introducing ever more features, some of debatable use. I, for example, would rather have alpha channel support, clip markers and timeline nudging than a disk ripper.
5) Why Canopus provides nothing in the way of learning resources for its products. Contrast what Canopus provides for people to learn its products with, say, Macromedia, or the Adobe Forums and Studio.
6) I recently had to reinstall my DVStorm. As anyone who had done this knows, it's a 16 step process, involving installing base programs, updates, patches, etc etc. Why can't Canopus roll all their patches and updates into a unified driver installlation?

I may add to this list later! But it's a start.

Mark

when are your Tech guys (in Japan) going to resolve the problem I have been having (for 3 months now) with my Canopus Twinpact100? Canopus UK said my Twinpact was sent to you in April 2005 to be looked at by your engineers, and I even made a video of the Twinpacts fault and put it on CD - which I understand has also been sent to your engineers in Japan.
The Twinpact100 has for me been a lamentable product, no-where near as good as Canopus' advertising claims. The Canopus forum is full of posts about the failings of this unit. I personally have never seen a Canopus Twinpact do what you say it can regarding scan conversion and screen area selection.
I paid nearly 400 UK pounds for the Twinpact100 and I've had nothing but dissappointment so far and still no word of progress from your engineers in Japan who are supposed to be investigating this.

Thanks people.

Anything more, how can I say, strategic, I can add to the list?

Bob C

What are there focus's for the future

What do they think of the Intel/Mac thing

How does he see the industry moving

What technology would he find useful.

Does he personally follow video editing - if so what is his system?

When do Canopus intend to address the shameful lack of implementation of DVCProHD support in their products (e.g. Edius Pro and ProCoder)?

Many professionals are currently forced to edit DVCProHD with FCP on the Mac, leaving powerful PC rigs gathering dust.

Canopus have a good reputation for being at the forefront of codec and associated NLE development, yet they have so far been failing their customers miserably, with regard to DVCProHD support.

Thanks.

John.

1. What Canopus's plans are for their DVStorm Premiere Pro plug in, and whether they ever intend to produce one which works as advertised?

2. Has Canopus ever heard of the well documented Premiere disappearing (Premiere poof) problem in Premiere 6.5 drivers and why did they never respond or address the issue?

3. Does he know about the Canopus DVStorm Premiere Pro driver petition? If so, why have Canopus never responded to the issues and when are they going to address them?

4. Why should we ever invest in another Canopus product when we have been let down with nothing but broken promises with the DV Storm/Premiere product?

Iain

Strategy? We don't need no steenkin' strategy! We need Canopus to communicate with their customers, to deliver on their promises, and to keep us in the loop with respect to bug fixes and oft-asked for feature enhancements.

So you could ask him what his strategy is for persuading me to buy another Canopus product ever again!

Edius Pro 3 supports DVCProHD with the optional codec pack.
No reason to let that PC gather dust.

Mark,

I'm not looking to avoid posing questions such as yours, simply asking for other types of questions too.

The fact that you have problems doesn't mean that questions about those problems are the only ones worth asking.

Bob C

Michael, I have to say that this optional extra is amazingly well hidden on Canopus's UK site.

Have you got a directly URL for it there or on another Canopus site?

Bob C

I would like to know if Canopus is serious about developing a full plugin for Ppro for the new generation of hardware cards like Nx and SP....and if so what kind of time table until it is available.

Sure..

EDIUS NX for HDV Canopus Codec Option
Catalog No > 706383
MSRP > £ 529.00

HERE's the URL
It's on the right.

"Canopus Codec Option
Optionally available for EDIUS NX for HDV is the Canopus Codec Option Pack, which includes the DVCPRO 50 and new DVCPRO HD software NLE codecs. Developed in collaboration with Panasonic, the Canopus DVCPRO HD codec provides EDIUS NX for HDV with high-quality HD video with full native DVCPRO HD (SMPTE 370M) compliance.

With the Codec Option Pack, EDIUS NX for HDV supports direct HD lossless capture and print–to-tape functions with the Panasonic DVCPRO HD VTR (AJ-HD1200A) in native 1080/60i/50i via any IEEE 1394 OHCI FireWire controller or the FireWire port on the EDIUS NX for HDV Expansion board. "
Here's that link

Michael,

Thanks.

Bob C

My questions for Mr Hiro Yamada relate primarily to Edius and are as follows:

[1] When can we expect to see a comprehensive manual for Edius, if necessary available on CD and/or as a downloadable file for registered users? At present my information is contained in four separate manuals - I am presently at v3.3 and I`ve been an owner and user since v1.

[2] When can we expect a complete and usable index to a comprehensive manual - if necessary on a CD and/or as a downloadable file? The present indices are mostly unhelpful. The built in Help files are getting better but can still be improved.

[3] The Canopus HDV Education site has posted definitions of some technical terms. When can we expect an extension of the publication of a comprehensive glossary of technical terms for Edius (and other Canopus products)?

[4] When can we expect the publication, by Canopus, of tutorials which demonstrate the product tools, features and functions within Edius?

Edius is, obviously, meeting the needs of an extremely wide user base, from broadcasters to serious hobbiests like me. It is also evident that the rapid rate of the product`s evolution has made the publication of a
comprehensive set of printed documents difficult to achieve. The addition of improved documentation and tutorials would be widely welcomed and, many consider, are essential for the more effective marketing of this otherwise excellent product.

Bob

In the case of 'strategy' questions for Canopus, the problem (as you can see from this thread) is that potential purchasers want Canopus to demonstrate that they are going to change their attitude before they are interested in what Canopus might offer in the future.

Three and four years ago I spent a lot of money on Canopus products. In the last two years, nothing. If Canopus in Japan knew about the problems with their products and with their website (specifically the Downloads section), then they chose to bury their heads in the sand.

Please ask Hiro Yamada if he was aware of the customer disatisfaction among his existing user base. Was he only interested in producing new products with inadequate features (Edius is a prime example) for sale to 'new' customers who were not aware of the lack of customer support and the lack of willingness to respond to feedback??

Ray Liffen

Hi
Strategically, the choice Canopus face is whether to enter the brave new world of PCI-Express with their own acceleration hardware, or, as others are doing, utilise the power of the GPU to achieve real-time compositing of all visual layering.

If they remain committed to their own hardware, will this be able to remain competetive with the graphics card industry's offerings.

Also Sony Vegas and Premiere Pro appear to be firmly committed to the use of Microsoft's latest Direct-X video libraries. Canopus seem to be wedded to a lecacy codec strategy (which has served them VERY well in the past), so what of the future, in a Windows Media (scalable) world?

By "Ppro" I presume you mean Adobe Premiere Pro.

If that's right, I'll ask the question, but I very strongly suspect that you won't need to read my interview to know the answer.

Canopus, I'd bet, has no plans to have Premiere Pro run on NX or SP or anything else in future.

But, please clarify the question.

Bob C

The point is taken and questions will be asked but I do also want to be able to include questions the answers to which will be of interest to the widest possible audience on the DVdoctor web site - and those, largely are about technology and marketing strategies.

You know me well enough to realise there's no fear of me doing a white-wash piece.

Bob

What is Canopus' position on the customer's who bought into the DV Storm/ Prem Pro package thinking it was going to be a "rocketfuel solution" which is clearly misleading and false advertising at best? Are they offering any kind of refund or free upgrade?

Does he feel that Canopus reputation has been damaged by the DV Storm/ Prem Pro fiasco?

What's his opinion on loosing so many customer's because of this issue?

Can he offer a trade in for Avid Mojo!

Iain

Bob, there is an active thread about this thread over on the Canopus Studio forum that you might also want to have a look at.
Here's a shortcut: http://tinyurl.com/7gkcd

BTW I think you're wrong about Premiere Pro on the NX: the development of a plug-in for this has been hinted at more than once by Canopus Personnel. Maybe you can ask Hiro for a definite answer!

Cheers

Mark

Mark,

PENTIUM pro?

Oh, and thanks for the link.

Interesting reading!

:(

Bob

Hi Bob, I think you may be surprised at the answer. I am a Mod on the Canopus Boards and the info I have(which isn't from the TOP for sure) is yes once Edius has risen to a level that I think it will achieve in 4.0 there are plans to develop a full plugin. What some people do not understand is exactly how a plugin like Storm works and why the Storm plugin basically sucked with Ppro. In a very simple sense when you opened up a Canopus preset in PPro you really have Edius running in the background of or rather through the PPro GUI....the codec is the same and the RT effects are the same but the buttons to get at the engines are different. The same will be true for any plugin for the next generation of boards.

One of the big knocks on the Storm plugin was/is the huge list of limitations it carried when used in PPro. The fact is the limitations were there in Edius as well so there was no way to push a Ppro GUI button and get the corresponding Edius feature to work. Now Edius has grown and is still growing and in 4.0 it will have things like nested sequences, better alpha support, mattes(part of alpha), and better keyframing. As those features match the native feature set of Ppro the limitations go away. A good example is when Ppro came out the Storm plugin did not support voice over. Edius got it and so now it can be put to use in a PPro plugin whereas before no way.

So yes I would like to know if the rumors from decent sources are right when they tell me that Ppro will get a serious plugin one day. Another good question may run along the lines of how given the Storm/Ppro debacle do they hope to get the Ppro user market confidence back.

Randy,

Thanks!

Bob

Hi Paul, the chipsets that are on the Nx and SP boards are capable of running on a PCIe card...right now PCIx is how they are mounted....they have fast write cababilies so I am reasonably sure when more workstation motherboards make the move to adopting multiple PCIe slots Canopus will be ready. The truth is the bandwidth we get with PCIx is plenty for what the cards do right now...no PCI busy problems that I know of editing HDV.Not sure on the HD side but haven't heard any complaints.

Bob, here's a link to start,

http://forum.canopus.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=premiere&Number=254826&Forum=All_Forums&Words=poof&Match=Entire%20Phrase&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=allposts&Main=252672&Search=true#Post254826

Iain

http://forum.canopus.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=237305&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

http://forum.canopus.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=236137&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

http://forum.canopus.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=213391&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

http://forum.canopus.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=181882&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

Premiere poof, see DR Storm's post- sums it up.
http://forum.canopus.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=premiere&Number=180874&Forum=premiere&Words=poof&Match=Entire%20Phrase&Searchpage=1&Limit=25&Old=allposts&Main=180593&Search=true#Post180874

Ray, Please do not presume to speak for all of Canopous Customers. You are not even close to being correct here. I have MANY clients that use Canopus products everyday and make a living at it, and they are completely happy.

Imaginate, Procoder, Edius, the converter line, and the hardware (like the NX and SP) are all great products that people are very happy with.

I work all of the Trade Shows for Canopus and the ratio of gripes to praise and excitment is very low (10 to 1 on the praise side easy) so your comment about the "Customer base" has no foundation at all.

Edius has made my life much easier and my workflow has improved greatly.

My question for Hiro would more along the lines of "What can we look forward to next!"

So please, if you are unhappy say it but please do not pretend to know what the rest of the customers are thinking.

Mike

ijmac. Sorry, your list of links came in a bit too late; I was on my way to the meeting when you posted, and so didn't see them until I returned.

But - to the meeting.

I found what Hiro said very interesting (and learned a lot, about Hiro, Canopus and video editing technologies) and I hope that the piece I'm writing will properly do justice to it.

The meeting lasted a bit over two hours, so - as I hope you'll realise - it will take me a while to transcribe my notes then turn them into something worth reading.

But what I can say here is that I was impressed by what I heard and thought that Hiro had some good answers to the many negative questions that I put (not that all the questions were about negative - they were far ranging, going back to Canopus's origins, and into future directions, too).

Mind you, one would have hoped Hiro he would have had ready answers to the negative questions because, it turns out he had read the threads and was sort of expecting to be ambushed!

(Can you ambush someone who's expecting it? Please discuss)

For people who are unhappy with what they see as Canopus's poor support for Premiere Pro, the key thing he said (and this is not a quote but the essence of what he said) is that the software development kit for Premiere Pro is rubbish - and that Canopus hadn't know that at the outset when it laid and announced its initial plans.

The big issue he identified is that because Pro has been built primarily for use with OHCI FireWire, rather than taking account of the needs of makers of third-party dedicated video cards, the SDK does not allow Canopus to do what it did with earlier versions of Premiere which is, in effect, to throw away a lot of Premiere's effects and replace them with Canopus's own.

So, what he was saying was that those people who want to use Premiere Pro on Storm but with Canopus's goodies can't, because the SDK doesn't allow Canopus to do that.

Reading between the lines, Canopus didn't feel able to come right out and say publicly that the SDK was useless - because it thought it needed to be a bit more diplomatic with Adobe to ensure it didn't destroy its relationship with the company.

However, as I see it, Hiro now feels able to speak openly because he feels that Adobe has effectively abandoned developers of third-party editing cards, so there's no longer good reason to worry about Adobe's sensibilities.

Mind you, perhaps Adobe could justifiably say that companies such as Canopus and Pinnacle were the ones to distance themselves - by developing programs that competed with Premiere?

And, I don't know what came first - Canopus's planned introduction of Edius or Adobe's decision to change what the SDK allowed companies such as Canopus to do.

What I do believe, though, is that any approaching comprehensive support for Adobe Premiere Pro will NOT be forthcoming from Canopus unless the new SDK that is provided for Premiere Pro 2 restores the functionality that Hiro said is missing from the current SDK.

If that doesn't happen, then all you'll see is that Premiere Pro treats cards such as NX and SP and Storm as bog-standard OHCI cards.

Any way, that's a little taster of the interview and people can (and doubtless will) give their take on it.

However, I'd hope to see many more comments once I've put up the full interview report.

Bob C

Thanks Bob, hopefully you got the gist of the frustration of being a Canopus customer (DV Storm- to be fair to Mike).

Some interesting points raised, " the software development kit for Premiere Pro is rubbish - and that Canopus hadn't know that at the outset when it laid and announced its initial plans". It didn't stop them marketing and continuing to sell DV Storm as a "rocket fuel" solution with PremPro even though they knew they couldn't get it to work- be interesting to see what all the customer's who bought the Storm with PP (who are still waiting a working driver) think of that one.

"and thought that Hiro had some good answers to the many negative questions that I put". Hopefully he addressed whether he had solutions for the customer's with these issues?

"Premiere Pro on Storm but with Canopus's goodies can't, because the SDK doesn't allow Canopus to do that". Did he say why they continued to sell it as a rocket fuel solution?

Seems that Canopus are quite happy to advertise and sell non working products knowing that they'll never work, not the way to keep your customer's as can be seen from the number who have deserted Canopus in the last couple of years.

Any word on a deal for an Avid Mojo ;-)

Iain

Nice to see some names I recognise from the Canopus forums.

Michael Dontigney
MSDowneyNet
and
RandyD

Slightly different to the names used on Canopus forums , but not too different.

Maybe you guys will stick arround and help out here too :) , if you aren't too busy working and answering questions on the Canopus forums.

The folks at Matrox said the same thing about the Adobe SDK for Premiere Pro. I don't doubt what Hiro said to be true.

The Premiere Pro 1.0 SDK was really bad.. The 1.5 SDK was better but still lacked the ability to do what they did in the earlier versions of Prmiere (just as Hiro stated).

I'll be here!

:)
(I had the name TekVideo here but lost my password and changed email accounts so I had to start over)

See this thread!

Yep.. That's me (Mike D) from 2001 when I was helping out with the DVnowAV. I reviewed it and had a site with downloadable files for it back then.. Anyone still here remember me?

Wow..

I'm old.. heh

That is very interesting and and here is why.The Canopus Beta plugin for Premiere Pro for the Nx and Sp cards right now support the capture, playback of Canopus codec files and video out functions in both Canopus SD and HDV presets inside PPro1.5.....These cards are really nothing more than a PCIx version of Storm that support component output of HDV and SD as well. For that matter the new cards have an ADVC mode that works for video out in native Premiere presets, After Effects and Photoshop CS. The cards basically relieve the processor from doing the overlay work in software since the cards do that work and send the overlay to the video card and out to monitor. The cards also do the linescaling meaning in the case of HDV scale the 1440x1080 PAR 1.33 to 1 to 1920X1080 PAR 1:1. They also line scale mixed resolution files...like 1440x 1080 mixed with 720x 480 for output to monitor. That is all the cards do and that is all that Storm, Raptor or Rex has ever done with DV.Don't get me wrong that is a lot of work but it is mostly related to video out and not really acceleration of the effects.(A common misconception is that the cards both new and old actually accelerate effects....they don't but do a lot of work that most NLEs do in software thus saving CPU cycles for RT)

The point is from a hardware standpoint Canopus has that ability hooked into PPro right now. The issue is whether the Edius engine and Canopus codec can run behind or rather through Ppro. The Canopus RT comes in most part from their efficient codecs and well designed use of their codecs with their effects engines.

Here is where I think it is interesting. Canopus having its engine and codec running through Ppro is no different than what Cineform is doing with Aspect or Prospect. Cineform right now have their transitions and color correction working fine. Their users are clamoring for more effects to work in an Aspect preset and it will be the same challenge for them as it will be for Canopus to get their engine and codec to work in Ppro with more than just basic tools....but I don't think the limitation is hardware given that the hardware end is working now.

Very true Randy not hazel.

heh

I see your green light on Tek.....good to see you around.

Mike

Take another look at my message. Is the word 'all' used in my reference to the customer base?

No, I don't claim to be speaking for all customers. I meet a lot of people to do with editing in the UK and I am certainly not alone in feeling 'let down' by Canopus in recent years. The Storm was an excellent product. By contrast, Edius was (do you not agree?) launched with an inadequate set of features (for the price) ? And would you not agree that there has been widespread dissatisfaction (just read the Canopus forums) with the visual design of Edius?

>if you are unhappy say it but please do not pretend to know what the rest of the customers are thinking.<

Well, I've been saying it right from the beginning (when Edius was first launched - look back on these forums and the Canopus forums). Yes, some additions have been made to the feature set in the last two years but I read the Canopus forums regularly and the constant cry is to bring the feature set up to the level of packages priced at a similar point in the market.

No, I don't claim to speak for 'all' customers but likewise you would surely not claim "to know what the rest of customers are thinking"?

One of the interesting aspects of this thread is the simultanious appearance of several moderators and other interested parties from the Canopus forums - presumably not a coincidence. Mike, this is only a question for you, but was it an attempt to balance the negative comments? As you say, "I work all of the Trade Shows for Canopus".

Ray Liffen

How did I end up MSDowneyNet?!?! :D

try this
http://forums.dvdoctor.net/profile.php?do=editprofile
and alter the name shown onscreen , though you will need to login as MSDowneyNet , you should be able to change the 'displayname' to anything within reason.
if not , pm me and i'll see what i can organise.