| Founded | April 1983 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Kobe, Japan |
| Products | EDIUS Series Video Systems ADVC Series Video Converters |
| Website | www.grassvalley.jp |
Canopus Co., Ltd. was a manufacturer of video editing cards and video editing software. The company's focus shifted from enthusiast video cards to other areas of video hardware and software after the release of their Spectra line of products.[1] Some of their previous competitors included Matrox and Pinnacle Systems. In 2005 Canopus was acquired by Thomson Multimedia in order to bolster their Grass Valley broadcasting and network business.[2]
When 3dfx's Voodoo series of PC-gaming-oriented 3D graphics cards became popular in the mid-1990s, Canopus was well-known for producing the Pure3D, a Voodoo-based graphics card with 6MB of memory instead of the standard 4MB. When the Voodoo 2 was released, the Canopus Pure3D II was praised for the fact that their cards were shorter than competitors' Voodoo 2 cards. Canopus also had a reputation for driver optimization, giving them a performance advantage over the other cards. They were the cards of choice for Maximum PC's 1998 Dream Machine.
Canopus also released a version of the nVidia TNT that offered a unique internal cable to connect the TNT card to the Voodoo2 based Pure3D II, as opposed to the standard connection with an external cable.
The Canopus DVStorm2 was a realtime video editing card, discontinued by Canopus in early 2005.
Canopus is also known for EDIUS, non-linear video editing software.
Canopus also manufactures ProCoder, software used for encoding MPEGs. However Canopus has been criticized for declining to provide its users with replacement keys [1].