by Michael Muchmore
discuss Total posts: 1
Last year, I didn’t give roxio Creator 2009 an Editors’ Choice, as I had previous versions of the media suite: it crashed too often, and the interface, although improved, was still a confusing jumble of options. But Creator 2010 ($99.99 list) gives roxio a good opportunity to reclaim its position. This year’s suite includes CinemaNow, the online movie service roxio acquired in 2008. Also new are a burning desktop widget, Web video capture, AVCHD archiving, and the ability to pause and schedule long conversion tasks. Plus, it’s fully compatible with Windows 7.
Installation
I installed the suite on a pristine Windows 7 Ultimate machine with a 3-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive. Installation is improved, taking just 10 minutes, ahead of Nero 9 Reloaded’s 12 minutes on the same PC. I wondered if it was just because I was using a faster system, but when I ran the install on last year’s test system, a 2GHz Athlon dual-core system with 2GB RAM, it was still much quicker: 24 minutes, compared with Creator 2009′s 40 and Nero’s 35.
I was, however, disappointed that I couldn’t choose which suite components to install (Nero now lets me), and that roxio still installs the Google Toolbar by default. A hundred-dollar app shouldn’t do that. Though the standard version of roxio burns Blu-ray data discs, to author movie Blu-ray discs, you need the Pro version, which costs $129.99. Pro also gets you more sophisticated soundtrack tools, disaster recovery, and more advanced photo-editing tools.
Interface
I quickly noticed that Creator grants Windows a Mac OS feature I’ve always thought Microsoft should add: displaying a desktop icon when you insert a disc into your drive. Clicking once on the disc gadget drops down a menu offering to copy or eject the disc, and right-clicking or clicking again on a small down arrow drops down more options. The interface resembles last year’s, but with much less clutter. The home screen offers big icons for the seven most popular functions: Burn data disc, burn image disc, copy disc, burn audio discs, create DVDs, edit video, and copy and convert video. These icons change to match your actual usage.
The first four choices use the same window as the start interface; the rest show up-curved arrows to indicate that they launch another program. Sadly, several of the suite’s sub-apps, like the Media Manager and PhotoSuite, retain outdated interfaces. I still prefer how Nero’s launcher closes and reappears when you run another program in the suite; roxio‘s works as an independent app. I do appreciate that you can just start any major suite component from the Windows Start menu. Another plus is that you can do more right from the home interface, like burn disc images. And the top of each sub-page in the start app now shows the top three actions for each category: e.g., the Music Audio page shows Burn Audio CDs, Rip, and Digitize LPs and Tapes
Video Editing
I encountered my first error message when importing video from my iPhone with roxio Media Import. That’s depressing, but overall I got far fewer errors than in the previous version. The same app works for importing both images and videos. My workaround was to import from the Photo page. This meant, however, that my videos were in the Pictures folder rather than in Videos. And for some reason, it didn’t import the PNG images on the iPhone.
The advanced digital movie editor hasn’t changed much. It can add tons of effects and transitions to your cinematic creations. One notable lack is the ability to rotate video. Most of us have used a point-and-shoot camera or iPhone sideways or upside down to shoot a video. Most popular software—and even some free software (including Picasa)—can rotate video to fix this. It’s overdue in roxio.
The suite’s much-improved CineMagic app makes it easy to create video compilations. CineMagic takes you through a three-step process that combines your footage and photos, and adds background music and titles. New this year, you can select scenes from within your clips. You can even have the selector window automatically highlight scenes that are dark, fuzzy, or those that include action or people. It’s not perfect, however—it missed that one talking head video contained people. I had 16 style choices for my instant movie, from baby to Xtreme. After choosing one, all that was left was picking a title and subtitle and setting the target length.
If you want to do more customization, the software offers more effects and transitions, including 37 in 3D, and a remarkable 99 special effects, from Abstract Stretch to Whirls and Waves. On top of this, you can choose from 37 overlays to add, such as frames and textures, and you can even create custom ones. Over 50 text styles are available for your titles and captions, and you can add your own audio or canned audio as a background soundtrack.
The previous version of Creator hiccupped when I made movies combining standard- and high-definition clips, creating an unviewable result. I’m happy to report that this time around I mixed content of all resolutions without a problem. Using the suite’s powerful VideoWave digital move editor, I successfully mixed MP4, MOV, WMV, and AVCHD MTS in the same production.
I’m still disappointed that CineMagic forces you to choose an audio track to replace the original video’s audio track, which is automatically erased. Even the fledgling, entry-level Corel Digital Studio 2010 lets you mix the original sound with a musical soundtrack in its automatic productions.
Once all your clips and effects are just how you want them, the Output menu gives you welcome new choices: share online, and Send to MyDVD. The workflow to disc authoring was something I’d missed in the last version. In the online sharing option, you can sign into your YouTube account right from VideoWave. The exporter created a YouTube-compatible version of my clip in a mere 3 minutes.
Authoring DVDs
MyDVD offers over 50 DVD menu styles, so you’re likely to find one that’s appropriate. You can have the burning software fit your project size to the target disc or leave it original size. MyDVD also includes a Plug & Burn feature for getting movies straight from your camcorder to disc. The software can autodetect chapters, but you may need to double-check this, as it created many inappropriate three-second chapters in my production. MyDVD encoded my 665MB, 8-minute test DVD in 4 minutes and burned it in 3 minutes. The resulting disc played flawlessly in a separate DVD player.
The new AVCHD Archive feature is handy for owners of camcorders using that recording standard. It lets them offload video content from the camera onto DVDs or Blu-ray discs at the original resolution. Multiple discs can be spanned if necessary, and the interface makes the process a straightforward one.
You can label your discs with a separate utility that gives you lots of control over the style, text, and layout of your labels; it supports LightScribe and LabelFlash drives, which can burn the title info directly onto special disc media.
Playing Movies
The player component of the suite, CinePlayer, handles 20 common video formats. Most importantly, it had no problem playing Winged Migration and Dances with Wolves, even though my monitor was connected with DVI without an HDCP-compliant monitor. It can now play back Blu-ray discs, but only if you spring for an extra $50 plug-in.
New in this version of Creator is integration with CinemaNow, which lets you rent and buy digital movies. roxio Venue implements this capability: it’s little more than a browser that displays the CinemaNow Web site. The selection included recent DVD releases you’d see in your local video store.
You can either purchase the videos for unlimited viewing at a cost of about $9.99 to $19.99, or rent them for a single viewing (within 24 hours) for about $2.99 to $3.99. You can play bought movies on up to three devices. Some of the movies are available in HD, but none of these are major titles. When I bought From Hell, starring Johnny Depp, my only viewing choice was to watch it on the current PC. About 15 seconds after my download started, enough had buffered that I could start watching. When I hit the full-screen button, I could see that the movie was playing in Windows Media Player. The picture was crisp, but the sound was muffled and with occasional stutters.
Could I burn a DVD to play the movie I’d bought on my TV? The answer is a qualified yes: Most movies don’t allow it, and you need a “Qflix”-compliant burner and special Qflix media—neither of which are common. Also, it takes a long time and several gigabytes of disk space to get ready for the burn.
Could I play my purchased movie on a portable? Again, a qualified yes: You can watch some movies on Windows “Plays for Sure” devices, but not on the iPod or iPhone, Microsoft Zune, or Creative Zen—three of the most popular handhelds. You can, however, use most Archos players and the Samsung P2. Instructions for watching these movies on your TV screen seem outdated, with no mention of HDMI
Burning and Copying
Windows 7 adds the ability to burn a disc image file (usually an ISO), but it would be an understatement to call the built-in app bare-bones. roxio‘s tools let you create bootable and read-only discs, and offer a more friendly and option-filled interface in general. Windows 7, too, burns Blu-ray discs, but again, roxio gives you more control. I still favor ImgBurn for image burning, though its interface doesn’t offer much hand-holding.
If you want to burn a backup disc of common personal file types, Creator will scan your disk for e-mails, financial records (such as from QuickBooks, Microsoft Money, and Turbo Tax), and other documents of interest. You can also drag files onto its windows to include them on the data disc you’re burning.
On the 3-GHz system, I burned 3GB of data onto a DVD in under 14 minutes. Burning a CD was also snappy, as in last year’s tests: 78 minutes of music took just 2 minutes and 43 seconds to burn. Nero 9 Reloaded, however, took just 10 minutes and 31 seconds for the DVD burn and 2 minutes and 53 seconds to burn the same songs to CD.
roxio Video Copy & Convert makes it easy to transfer your video files to a multitude of target devices, including discs (DVD or Blu-ray), handhelds like the PSP, iPhone, Zune, Xbox, TVs, and video files. This is a separate issue from the CinemaNow content, which is more limited in portable device support. But roxio makes it easier to rip video from streaming Web sources (like YouTube) than do other suites. You just click the big Web Video button, start your video, and ,when it’s done playing, you’ll be able to save the clip to any of the above targets. But when I tried this with my iPhone, I couldn’t copy the video to the phone’s storage. After installing iTunes, the problem went away.
The cute SyncIt! gadget accomplishes about the same and pops up when you choose Drag-and-Drop convert from the main Video menu. Last time I tested this it was quite unstable, but this time it accepted and output various file formats with aplomb.
Photo
Despite its dated interface, roxio‘s PhotoSuite offers a wealth of photo editing capabilities. In addition to autofix, you can straighten, fix red eyes, manipulate brightness and contrast, adjust sharpness, smooth wrinkles, and clear up blemishes. The red eye fixer is a bit behind those in other products: It actually gave a blue hue to whole eye sockets in one of my tests. I prefer Picasa’s one-click red-eye fixer. The other fixers worked well, and the Mobile Photo Doctor will be welcome to phone shutterbugs. There’s a separate app that enhances multiple photos at once, and, as with PhotoSuite, you can drag and drop multiple photos onto it for editing.
There are plenty of Photoshop-like special effects and filters: clone brush, shapes, and cutouts, but no magic wand–style auto silhouetting. Special effects include filters like emboss, posterize, and funhouse mirrors—over a hundred in all. Text tools are full-fledged as well, letting you easily add captions in many fonts and any size; I could even rotate them, just as in Picasa.
roxio offers a wealth of tools for making calendars, collages, posters, and cards, but unlike Picasa and Corel Digital Studio, there’s no way to create a photo book; and the collage tool, although flexible, isn’t as slick as Picasa’s. A slideshow app doesn’t allow dragging and dropping. roxio has updated its PhotoShow online slideshow sharing service with a slider that lets viewers skip around in a show, display images faster, and import from e-mail. But PhotoShow is completely separate from the image and slideshow editors. You can post a PhotoShow directly to Facebook or your PhotoShow page. While you use PhotoShows, there are frequent messages about why you should upgrade to a premium version. One is that you can’t post shows containing more than 24 images with a free account
Music and Audio
I used my a iPhone recording of a windwood quintet concert to test roxio Sound Editor. I wasn’t interested in fading and volume manipulation, but “clean up audio” sounded useful. This tool offers declicker, decrackler, and denoiser. The last did a nice job of getting out the background hiss. A separate audio tag editor can pull CD info from the GraceNote service, or you can enter your own track details.
The suite also includes a helpful how-to for converting LPs and tapes to digital formats. The cleaning tools mentioned above are great for this. You can also create music discs on either CD or DVD, and even use BeatMatch to keep your party playlist rolling. The Audiobook tool will take a CD audiobook and convert it for your portable music player (yes, even iPod), preserving chapter names for display on the device.
Ripping songs from CD to my test PC at a 256-Kbps bit rate took roxio 4 minutes and 26 seconds; Nero needed 2 minutes and 48 seconds. The “Time Remaining” indicator was useless, constantly showing increasing and decreasing estimates. Unlike most ripping software, roxio doesn’t display a progress bar for each song, but Nero doesn’t show you an overall “time remaining” estimate, so it’s a toss up.
Conclusion
My overall impression from running the tools in roxio Creator 2010 is that the suite’s been tightened up considerably—I encountered far fewer bugs than I did last year. Plus, the suite’s already staggering number of media editing, authoring, recording, and transcoding tools has been bolstered by a more usable interface and some useful new tools.
True, Nero 9 Reloaded burned discs slightly faster on both DVD and CD tests and on multiple machines. And some apps in roxio‘s suite are starting to look a bit outdated, and occasionally when I banged on it by performing actions in quick succession, an app would close or become unresponsive. But overall, roxio Creator 2010 makes commendable headway over last year’s version. I can’t declare a definitive Editor’s Choice in the digital media space until I’ve put Nero 9 Reloaded and CyberLink DVD Suite through their paces, however. Stay tuned.
article provided by :
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2354342,00.asp
Tags: roxio, roxio creator 2010, roxio review