FRANK ALDANA WINS GRASS VALLEY EDIUS COMPETITION
February 22, 2010

FRANK ALDANA WINS GRASS VALLEY EDIUS COMPETITION

Over 200 people from 52 different countries registered for the competition, but it was Aldana who took home the grand prize, a full post production package comprised of an HP ProBook laptop, a Panasonic camcorder and an external hard drive.

Aldana is a freelance editor, based in the Philippines, who’s been cutting for 18 years. In 2005,  he built his own editing rig around a DVStorm XA and Eduis 3.0. “It’s been my weapon of choice ever since,” he says. “It’s fast and fluid, and its responsiveness reminds me of old-school linear edit controllers. It works — plain and simple.”
 
Two other participants also gained attention: Miroslav Matanovic of Croatia and David Yoshpe of Israel. Both will receive a copy of Edius Neo 2 Booster and an external USB hard drive.

To view the winning submissions, check out this LINK.


Editor’s Note: Several readers questioned whether or not the winning video was, in fact, created using Grass Valley’s Edius software. Grass Valley’s Steve Wise responded.

Steve Wise: “We had a lot of discussion about this prior to the competition, and I was of the mind that one of the primary objectives of the competition should be to create more awareness outside of the Edius community. As you know, this comes up time and time again on the forums (‘best kept secret,’ ‘no-one's heard of Edius,’ etc).
 
“To this end, the agency was instructed to target places where we hadn't traditionally been visible in the past: film festivals, film schools, arguably more 'maverick' Websites and blogs, etc. If we're being honest, it's highly likely that these younger target audiences, if they are editing already, are probably going to be more disposed to Macs, and we didn't want that to be a barrier. So we didn't make the use of Edius a pre-requisite for this reason. We didn't volunteer the information either, but we thought we had a pretty good cushion with the fact that the competition would, by default, attract pro-Edius material, else it wouldn't be a valid commercial.
 
“Agreed, this could have opened us up to a fabulous Edius commercial being cut on Final Cut, but it didn't come to that. My argument would be that if it helps us get the Edius message to more people, what does it matter? But other people within the company shared [the reader’s] view, it must be said.”