Needing help with NIS

Is is possible to open replays and edit them via NIS?

I'm just wondering if there's an easier way to have units moving around in combat and such to edit with NIS or even just have them as background extras while i use actors for custom things?

There must be an easier way to have lots of units in combat just by using replays or possibly some other way i haven't figured out yet, as the method just to get a few units running/shooting/dying is quite tedious and time consuming with having to spawn actors, assign animations, assign a gun, placing down lines for them to move forward and having to time it right to avoid sliding effects and so on, i have yet to figured out how to get them to aim without having to manually rotate the unit around. :/

Any help is greatly appreciated :3
I've always wanted to give machinima in CoH2 a go i was thinking of going back and trying with CoH1 since there's more documentation but with the Western Armies coming out in a few months figured i might as well stay with CoH2.

[Update]
Singleplayer NIS files do open but only the camera works and the actors are all idle but i would assume that's due to the fact almost all the SP NIS files are meant to be rendered in game where as something like the multiplayer Stalingrad map has two working nis files for part of the "Victory at Stalingrad" trailer http://youtu.be/kOz0EnzXIQQ?t=44s from 0:45 onward, so for now I'm just using that to see how they've done it.

Still in certain parts of the trailers it looks like they have regular gameplay movement and such with some added NIS effects they might have used the same method i just found over here but that appears to be for CoH1 but ill soon test this out and post my results.