by Douglas Dixon
www.manifest-tech.com
Desktop Digital
Media: Capture, create, convert,
consume
Roxio Easy Media Creator
Media Management and Sharing Trends:
UPnP
Media Playback Trends: CinePlayer
Capture Trends: Media Import
Format Conversion Trends: Disc
Copier
Audio Editing and Sharing Trends:
Edit, Capture, Create
Photo Editing and Sharing Trends:
PhotoSuite
Video Editing Trends: VideoWave
DVD Authoring Trends: MyDVD
Customization and Automation
References
Today's
computers, software applications, and
digital media equipment make it easier
than ever to create and share your
digital video productions. Earlier
trends like the growth of the DV video
format and DVDs enabled real TV-quality
editing on personal computers, and the
growth of the Web and broadband Internet
access opened up new ways of sharing
productions.
As we
enter 2007, trends that began developing
last year are coming to fruition. Sites
like YouTube and Google Video have
exploded interest in informal short-form
video, and low-res video thrives on
portable devices from pocket MP3 players
to cell phones. At the other extreme, in
the living room, the home theatre
high-def experience is coming into reach
with affordable wide-screen displays,
HDV camcorders, and next-gen DVDs. And
new networking technologies allow even
broader sharing, both between devices on
the home network, and peer-to-peer
across the Internet.
Meanwhile,
even more professional technology is
flowing down to consumers, from HD
editing, to scene detection, to
automated movie making, to advanced DVD
menus and navigation.
The newest
poster child for these developing trends
and technologies is the latest
Roxio Easy Media Creator suite,
version 9. EMC 9 handles all different
types of digital media (video, audio,
photos, data) through the end-to-end
workflow, from capture to editing to
sharing. The EMC suite provides a nicely
integrated collection with both strong
individual tools, and a variety of
utilities for doing simple things
quickly and efficiently.
Whatever
your tool set, working with digital
media on the desktop with today's tools
does span a ridiculously wide range of
tasks, features, and formats.
Roxio
describes the process for EMC 9 as
"capture, create, convert and consume"
-- the broad scope of assembling digital
media assets, editing and enhancing,
re-formatting for different delivery
devices, and then playback and sharing.
The
digital media assets also span the three
basic media types: audio and music,
images and photo slideshows, and video
clips -- plus data (file and disc
copying and backup). And these are
imported and exported in a wild
assortment of formats: captured from /
to tape, imported and burned on CD / DVD
discs, stored on hard disk in various
compressed digital formats, as well as
reduced-sized versions for portable
players.
Roxio Easy
Media Creator addresses this range as a
suite of strong applications, augmented
by quick utilities and assistants for
simple dedicated tasks. This trend
toward suites has been developing in
recent years, as single applications
bulk up to perform more functions, and
companies combine individual
applications into full-solution
collections.
EMC is
built from several lines of software
acquired by Sonic Solutions over the
years, including the venerable Roxio
Easy CD Creator for CD/DVD burning,
Sonic's disc backup tools, Sonic MyDVD
and CinePlayer for disc authoring and
playback, and MGI's suite of media
editing tools including VideoWave and
PhotoSuite.
In the
most recent versions, Sonic has been
working to more tightly integrate the
different components into the suite
(especially MyDVD), and to fill out the
utilities and assistants for common
tasks. Roxio Easy Media Creator
9 was released in September 2006 for
US $99.99 suggested retail price ($79.99
with rebate). It includes over 100 new
features, especially with Windows Vista
support, enhanced audio DVD creation,
more sophisticated DVD designs, portable
device support, and Blu-ray disc burning
and copying (www.roxio.com/enu/products/creator/suite).
EMC starts
up with a Roxio Home screen
that provides a task-oriented list of
activities you can perform, based on the
basic media type (Data, Backup, Copy,
Audio, Photo, Video). The Home tab also
provides an Applications list, with the
main applications and associated
utilities. (These also can be run
directly from the Windows Start menu.)
For quick tasks, many of the tabs offer
"Easy" operations that can be performed
directly in the Home window, without
needing to launch a separate tool (i.e.,
Easy Audio Capture, Easy Archive, Copy
Disc, burn Data Disc).
Roxio Home
One big
trend with digital media is simply the
proliferation of content, all those
different files from different sources
splattered across your hard disks. Much
as photo viewer applications like
Apple's iPhoto are becoming more common
to browse your photos by date and
themes, there's a need for even more
general media management tools to get
all your files organized.
Easy Media
Creator 9 provides the Media
Manager application to organize,
browse, and search your media
collections -- organizing all your
assets in a unified view to provide
quick file viewing and playback. Beyond
viewing, Media Manager also serves as a
work center for importing additional
media, and running other EMC tools to
process, convert, and share the files.
Media Manager
But
sharing now means more than just making
files. It also includes targeting
specific portable devices, including
Apple iPods, the Sony PlayStation
Portable (PSP), and mobile phones. For
example, the EMC Media Manager has a
Split View for copying groups of files,
including to a mobile phone connected by
Bluetooth or USB.
And
sharing also means across networks,
using two mechanisms built into EMC.
MediaSpace shares and plays
your content across home networks using
the UPnP protocol
(Universal Plug and Play,
www.upnp.org), supported on PCs by
servers like Windows Media
Connect (www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/devices/wmconnect)
and on set-top devices like DVD players
and dedicated media servers.
In
addition, the LiveShare
feature shares your Media Manager files
over the Internet to other EMC users
using a direct peer-to-peer connection.
Media
playback is also evolving as PCs with
high-res screens and surround-sound
audio become quite interesting for
viewing DVDs and recorded videos.
Dedicated
DVD players like CinePlayer
in Easy Media Creator 9 can provide a
great DVD viewing experience, with the
ability to selectively display DVD
features. CinePlayer also supports
Sonic's InterActual
technology for running DVD-ROM
activities and games from movie discs (player.interactual.com).
But the
newer trend is "lean-back" interfaces
for viewing media on a PC from a
distance, i.e., sitting on the couch
with the family. For example, EMC
includes the Media Experience
interface, with simple menus designed to
be accessed from the keyboard or even a
PC remote control. You can listen to
music, view photo slideshows, watch
movies, and play DVDs, all on the
full-screen PC display.
Once you
can organize and view your media, you'll
want to capture more to use in your own
productions. But there are so many
formats, and so many different kinds of
devices. And many devices capture
multiple formats -- videos on cameras
and photos on camcorders. So the trend
in digital media software is to support
more and more devices, and especially
new portable devices like cell phones.
Easy Media
Creator 9 provides a dedicated
Roxio Media Import tool for managing
acquiring photos, audio, and video.
Images can be imported from cameras and
scanners. Audio can be ripped from CDs
and DVDs or recorded from analog input
like a microphone or line-in from a
player. Video can be transferred from a
camcorder, extracted from a DVD, or
captured from an analog source via a TV
or capture card. The software will find
the available devices on your system and
guide you through the import process,
including choosing the appropriate media
file format for your needs.
One nice
trend for importing content is the
ability to extract content from finished
DVDs (personal discs, not protected
commercial releases). This means that
older DVDs are no longer locked up --
you can go back and re-use content from
your discs.
Besides
importing and re-using material from
discs, another major trend for re-using
DVDs is disc copying tools that allow
you to extract portions from discs to
directly export to a new DVD -- or
quickly create a DVD from a compilation
of video files -- or extract and convert
to a variety of file formats.
The
Disc Copier tool in Easy
Media Creator 9 provides one-stop
shopping for disc extraction and
conversion. You can select specific
clips and tracks from a DVD and then
extract them to a new DVD.
Disc Copier
Or you can
create a compilation of movie files from
hard disk and burn them directly to DVD,
or convert the compilation as a movie to
a variety of video file formats, from
3GP / MPEG-4 for cell phones, to H-264/AVC
for iPod, to MPEG-2 for DVD, to Windows
Media Video (WMV) HD for high-def
playback.
The key
trends for audio are more automated help
for extracting and cleaning up clips
(including creating ringtones for cell
phones), and more customized ways for
creating music playlists (including DVD
music discs).
Easy Media
Creator 9 includes a core audio editing
tool, Sound Editor, with
tools for importing, editing, enhancing,
and exporting waveform audio. But the
real fun is in the ten additional
utilities for common functions. For
working with CDs, there are assistants
for quickly extracting songs in various
formats and then creating your own music
CDs, including the Xingtone
tool for creating ringtones and sending
them to your mobile phone.
But the
real challenge is for audio that has
been capturing from other sources, not
just from CDs already nicely already
organized into individual songs. For
this, EMC has Easy Audio
Capture to grab audio input from
your sound card (i.e. from an external
analog tape player). Plus, it can
capture the audio being played by your
sound card -- for example, to record
streaming Internet audio. To make the
process even easier, EMC 9 has a small
desktop "widget" mode you can leave
running on your desktop, and then click
to start recording -- including a
preroll of buffered audio from before
you clicked. Plus, you can mute other
system sounds while recording, and
automatically stop after a period of
silence for unattended recording.
But what
about collections of songs that you want
to transfer from records or tapes? For
this, EMC has an even more specialized
tool, the LP & Tape Assistant.
This is designed to capture your
material, split it into tracks, clean up
the sound to reduce noise.
However,
you still have the problem of
identifying the tracks -- the digital
music files need the "metadata" ID
information stored in the files to
identify the song title, artist, album,
genre, and other information when you
browse your media. When you rip an
entire CD, the software can look up this
information online and download the CD
info. But what about assorted individual
music files? For this, EMC offers the
new Tag Editor, which uses
a "fingerprint" of the music to look it
up in the online Gracenote MusicID song
recognition service, and then embed the
information directly in the file.
There's also a new Rename Audio
Files utility that will rename your
music files based on the embedded tag
information, and move files to a new
location.
Once
you've collected your music, the fun
comes in creating personal playlists and
sharing them. You can play music on your
PC, transfer to portable devices, and
burn an audio CD. But an audio CD only
can hold some 10 to 20 songs in its
uncompressed format, while you can store
hundreds of songs on the same disc with
today's compressed formats like MP3,
Windows Media Audio (WMA), and MPEG-4 /AAC.
EMC calls this a Jukebox Disc,
which then can be played on computers,
or on some audio and DVD players that
support common compressed formats (look
for the appropriate logo on the front
panel).
Even
better, you can burn a music collection
to DVD -- that's large enough to hold
some 50 hours of music. The EMC
Quick Music DVD tool also
automatically builds navigation menus to
list your music like in a PC player,
with menus by categories like artist and
album, plus song information and album
artwork, and even a random-play shuffle
mode.
Finally,
for full customization there's the new
Music Disc Creator. Create
audio CDs, jukebox mix discs, or music
DVDs, complete with DJ-style fades. For
DVDs, customize the menu style and
navigation. Then use the AutoMix
playlist maker to search your library
for tracks that are similar to theme
song that you select.
Working
with photos is also becoming easier with
more automated tools for cleaning and
enhancing. And photos are becoming more
alive with two trends: making dynamic
animated slideshows, and using photos in
creative projects, especially for gifts.
For photo
editing, Easy Media Creator 9 includes
the core PhotoSuite
application to edit and enhance photos,
create projects and gifts, and share
pictures on CD, DVD, email or via
LiveShare.
EMC also
includes assistants to import photos,
fix and enhance groups of images, create
multi-image panoramas, and e-mail or
print the results. Then there's the
Photo Projects Assistant,
to create photo albums, calendars,
cards, collages, gift tags, and posters.
But
sharing photos can be much more dramatic
with the Slideshow Assistant.
Create widescreen slideshows with
transitions, pan & zoom motion,
multi-image photo collages, and
background soundtrack. Then share as a
video movie file, or burn to disc to
play back on a set-top DVD player.
Slideshow Assistant
The major
trends in video editing pull in
different directions: the addition of
more functionality from professional
tools, and assists to simplify and
automate the editing process.
For example, the flagship
VideoWave video editor in
Easy Media
Creator 9 has been bulked up with a 32
track editing timeline (including audio,
effects, overlays, and text) in addition
to the storyboard interface, plus
multi-trim editing, and timeline chapter
markers used in creating DVDs. At the
same time, it has added automated video
color correction and noise removal.
VideoWave
Plus, even
today's consumer video editing
applications now support editing high
definition video, in formats such as
HDV (www.hdv-info.org),
MPEG (www.mpegif.org),
and Windows Media Video
formats (www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia).
Some video editors can work with the
native compressed data directly, and
others convert to an intermediate format
for editing.
At the
same time, EMC offers an easier
automated approach to assembling videos
with CineMagic. Just feed
it your raw video, and it will scan
through looking for good-quality scenes,
and then automatically edit it down to a
nice summary video production, complete
with background audio and photo slide
shows. You can customize the theme, and
help pre-select scenes of interest
(including or excluding scenes that are
dark, fuzzy, have fast action, or
contain people). As with other EMC
components, you can export your project
to VideoWave for further editing.
Finally,
DVD authoring has come to the masses,
with the ability to share movies, photo
slideshows, music, and data across
computers and set-top players. The
trends with DVD are familiar: automated
support for common operations,
customization with more professional
features, and support for an even
broader range of formats.
To quickly
transfer material to DVD with a minimum
of fuss, use Quick DVD / MyDVD
Express to assemble a group of clips
and automatically generate index menus.
But today's DVD players also support
additional formats (like MP3 and WMA
audio), so you can also use Disc Copier
to create discs with video files,
including DivX DVDs. Or to just transfer
a tape directly to disc, use
Plug and Burn to transfer DV tapes
from a camcorder directly to a DVD.
And now
there's the new high-def disc formats,
offering an exciting increase in
capacity for sharing videos, much as
DVDs were so much bigger than CDs for
storing music files. For example, EMC
has added Quick Blu-ray Disc,
which takes advantage of Blu-ray's
larger capacity and broader format
support to transfer hours of standard or
high-definition video to a Blu-ray BDAV
disc (www.blu-raydisc.com). Blu-ray is
25 GB for single-layer and 50 GB for
dual-layer, so single Blu-ray disc can
hold up to 12,500 music tracks, 50,000
photos, or 4 hours of raw HD video.
Then for
more customized DVD authoring, you can
turn to the flagship MyDVD
tool, which is designed to support the
full process of assembling movies and
slideshows, designing menus styles, and
customizing the navigational flow.
Import and edit video clips, add
effects, transitions, and overlays, and
set chapter points. Design menus by
choosing menu and button styles from the
gallery, and then have full control over
customizing the menu background and
elements, including audio, text styles,
and button highlights.
MyDVD 9
MyDVD 9
also adds animated video transitions
between menus, and advanced button
linking, so you can have a button play
from a different starting point or
return to a different video or menu
after playing.
Easy Media
Creator also includes a set of data
burning and backup tools now with Blu-ray
Disc support, including Creator
Classic burning,
Drag-to-Disc packet writing,
Easy Archive, and
Backup MyPC. And it has tools for
working with discs in different formats,
including DVD volumes and disc images on
hard disk. Finally, the DVDInfo
Pro utility displays detailed
information about drive capabilities and
disc media properties, as well as
running error and performance tests.
There's a
real ying and yang aspect for consumers
in today's digital media desktop --
opposing yet complementary forces that
are being harmonized in software
applications like Roxio Easy Media
Creator 9 that are impressively usable,
functional, and inexpensive.
We are
seeing both demand for high-resolution
full-length movies in the living room,
and for low-res short-form clips on
portable devices. And while the next
wave of technology and customization is
being passed down from professional
tools, at the same time the software is
getting better at making at least simple
things easier with automated assistants.
Whether
you're a novice just getting started, or
an enthusiast who want room to grow for
more customization, Easy Media Creator
can do the job for you.
Roxio - Easy Media Creator 9
www.roxio.com/enu/products/creator/suite
Sonic - InterActual Player
player.interactual.com
Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)
www.upnp.org
Microsoft Windows Media Connect - UPnP
server
www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/devices/wmconnect
HDV
Information
www.hdv-info.org
MPEG
Industry Forum - MPEG-4 - AVC / H.264
www.mpegif.org
Microsoft - Windows Media Video (WMV)
www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia
Blu-ray
Disc (BD)
www.blu-raydisc.com
HD
DVD
www.hddvdprg.com
Originally
published in
Camcorder & Computer Video magazine,
Buyer's Guide 2007.
Manifest
Technology®
Copyright 1999-2007,
Douglas Dixon, All Rights Reserved
Manifest Technology is a
registered trademark of Douglas Dixon
