nc10's Full Review: Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 Full Version for PC (21...
Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 (EMC7) is the latest version of Roxio's digital media (digital audio, video and stills) software suite. The term Software Suite seems to be broadly used now, but in this case it is justified, as Roxio has bundled several related and full featured applications (not just "lite" versions) to create a consistent user experience. EMC7 builds on Easy CD Creator 6 by adding better video and digital image editing tools with many more features, support for ogg vorbis audio files, support for copying and compressing unencrypted DVD’s, as well as a few other features while improving the “common look and feel” between EMC7’s separate applications.
Easy Media Creator 7 (EMC7) comes on two cd’s one with the application software and one with additional digital content for your projects.
Installation
I purchased Easy CD Creator 5 about 3 years ago, and was very satisfied with the purchase. When I recently noticed version 7 was released I requested a copy to review here on Epinions. Roxio quickly agreed, and mailed a boxed copy of the program. Once received, I opened the box and after inserting the cd, I followed the on screen instructions and ran into no problems installing EMC7. I installed EMC7 on a Dell 4550 desktop with a 2.66 ghz cpu and 768mb ram running Windows XP Home, a Verbatim 52X cdwriter (a rebadged LiteOn 522446), a Dell 4X R/RW DVD writer (a rebadged NEC 1100A), Soundblaster Live card, ATI All in Wonder 9800 Pro video card, and two hard drives. EMC7 comes on two cd’s, a software cd and a cd with lots of audio, graphics, and video content to spice up your projects. EMC7 includes an update utility, which I’ve used twice to install updates since I first received my copy of EMC7.
Using EMC 7
With each new version, Roxio’s flagship CD / DVD authoring software and has grown and improved, with more features and functionality, and with improved integration of its various parts. EMC7 is still a collection of applications that can be launched individually, but each offers a common look and feel, and often one application opens another as you develop a project. You can access all the parts of EMC7 at once by launching the EMC7 Home page, an effective interface for accessing the EMC7 tools. Home is broken down into three major sections
- The top section offers a choice of 20 tasks broken down into 5 categories, Music, Data, Photo, Video, and DVD. Tasks available vary from “create a new audio cd” to “create a backup project”, to “capture video” to “create a new DVD”.
- The middle section offers a choice of the applications by name, including:
Disk Copier
Creator Classic (for burning data DVD’s)
Photosuite
DVD Builder
VideoWave
Drag-to-Disc
Napster
Media Manager
Capture
Label Creator
Sound Editor
Roxio Player
Help and Tutorials
Extras (Updater, Drive Info Utility, etc)
- The bottom third of the Home view shows thumbnail views of recent projects, video’s and images, which you can click on to resume work.
One of the key applications, really extending the Home view, is Media Manager. Media Manager searches all or part of your hard drive(s), searching directories selected by you for digital media content, and provides several ways of organizing and searching this content. Media Manager also tracks all of the EMC7 projects as you develop them.
Creator Classic
Burning data and music cd’s and dvd’s is a straightforward and simple arrangement with EMC7. The look and feel of this part of EMC7 is a bit changed from previous versions, notably to include the “Backup Project” feature. Creator Classic presents a familiar "explorer-like" interface to users, with the screen divided into three parts, the top part being a view of what’s on your hard drives (the source view) and the bottom being your blank cd or dvd (the project view). On the left side of the screen is a preview window of what’s you might be preparing to burn to cd or dvd, ie for video or audio playback. Below that are two small sets of icons, one for common projects (data, audio, or mp3 discs) and one for advanced projects (ie bootable cd’s). Below that are a set of icons for related tasks, including label creation, accessing the drive/device utility, burning image files, or calling up previous backup projects.
Across the top are the standard windows menu choices, and along the bottom is a status bar showing how full your disk will be after burning, as well as a dropdown menu to choose which size disks you’re using.
If you have a music cd in your drive, Creator Classic will access Gracenote internet database to identify the tunes on your cd. You can rip tunes from the cd and save them to your hard drive as wav files, mp3 files (and choose which encoder to use), wma files, or ogg vorbis files. You can also select between constant and variable bit rate, and from a wide range of bit rates.
Burning data cd’s is straightforward, just drag files to from the source view to the project view. Creator Classic will span data across more than one disk. If you drag more than a full cd’s worth of data to the project view, EMC7 will assume you want to “span” the data across more than one cd, and the status bar will on the bottom of the screen will change to show how many CD’s or DVD’s will be required. You can also choose to encrypt data burned to cd, and password protect the data by a 128 bit encryption scheme.
When you later want retrieve data from one a set of “spanned discs” or any encrypted disc, a Retrieve utility, which is burned to each spanned cd or dvd, will pop up, which you’ll need to retrieve any of the files from the cd/dvd set that are split over two or more disks. Encrypting data doesn’t seem to add much to the time required to burn a cd.
The “Backup Project” feature included in Creator Classic takes advantage of disc spanning. Backup Projects to help you backup drives or folders (but not individual files). Backup Project helps you select which directories you want to back up, whether or not to encrypt the backup, and will remind you when its time to make another backup. It also allows you to exclude file types (ie video files, archive files, system files, etc). Selecting directories to backup can be tedious. If you select a drive or directory to back up, all directories on that drive or subdirectories below that directory must be included in the backup. You can’t deselect individual directories below a selected directory or drive, so if you want to backup 18 of 20 subdirectories under you’re “my documents” folder, you can’t select my documents, and unselect the two unwanted directories, you have to go in and select 18 directories. Backup Project does not compress data. To restore files from the backup project, the Retrieve utility is used.
Disk Copier
Disk Copier is often used to make 1:1 copies of non-copy protected CD’s and DVD’s. Disk Copier will also make copies of un-encrypted video DVD’s (typically containing up to about 8gb of data), and compress the video content so that it will fit on one recordable DVD. To minimize the loss in quality due to compression, you can choose to copy only the main video (or any one video) and/or just the main audio stream, but you can’t select, for example, the main audio stream and director’s commentary stream, while leaving out the foreign language audio streams. Similarly, if you have a copy of a DVD’s files on your hard drive, Disk Copier will find those files and make a compressed copy on one DVD. The interface for copying a DVD is pretty slick, it presents a playable thumbnail view of each video on a DVD so that you select the right video to copy, and provides an estimate of compression level to give you a feel for the quality of the final copy.
To see how well copying DVD’s worked, I copied the full content (all folders) of a commercial DVD containing 7.5 gb of data with several video’s, features, and audio tracks, to my hard drive, removing the encryption using a freeware program DVD43. Though Disk Copier would not copy the original DVD, it would copy the video folders on my harddrive, previewing the main video and features contained in the .vob files, and estimated that a “medium” level of compression would be required to compress the original DVD onto one recordable DVD. After pushing the button, Diskcopier required about 43 minutes to compress the data, after which it burned the compressed video onto a recordable DVD. I don’t think image quality of the copy was quite as good as the original, but the difference was subtle, with video still VHS quality or better, images looked sharp even when zoomed in at 4x. The DVD copies played fine both on my computer and on our Apex AD2500 stand-alone DVD player.
Disk Copy handles will burn most image file formats, including iso and bin/cue files, and it supports raw mode copying.
Drag to Disc
Drag to Disc formats cdr/rw’s and DVD R/RW’s so that you can save files to writable disks just like you save files to a floppy disk or hard. This allows you to drag and drop files to a blank cd using windows explorer, or erase files from disks. Erasing a file from a cdr removes the file, but does not free up space, while erasing a file from a cdrw does free space. Drag to Disc creates a file system based on Universal Disk Format (UDF) v 1.5, and supports the Mt. Rainier standard for making disks available for read/write use within a few seconds of starting to format a disk. Drag to Disc also includes Scandisc, a utility that helps repair and recover data from bad cd's, a "undelete" utility, and an option that compresses data files as they are saved to a cd. To read UDF formatted disks, computers need to have UDF software, like Drag to Disc, installed.
Since Drag to Disc supports “Mt. Rainier” capable drives, it can format a blank cdrw in Mt. Rainier capable writers very quickly. Time required to "apparently" format a 650mb 16X-24X rated CDRW’s in my 52X LiteOn cdwriter is about 25 seconds. (I say apparently, because some formatting continues in the background, even though you can write to the disk after 25 seconds) Formating a 650mb disk to enable “drag to disk” writing leaves about 502 mb of usable space. Some of the “lost space” is taken up by an installer for Roxio’s EasyWrite software. If you try to use a formatted disk on a computer where UDF software such as Drag to Disc has not been installed, you’ll be given the option to install the EasyWrite Software to enable you to use the disk on that computer. Writing to this disks is fairly quick, typically I can save about 100mb of data to a formatted “ultra” speed CDRW (16-24X) in about one minute. Formatting disks on drives that don’t support Mt. Rainier (older cd writers rated for 40X speeds or less, and some DVD/CD combination drives) takes much longer. Formatting a 12X rated High Speed CDRW required about 12 minutes on the combination cd/dvd writer on my system (a NEC 1100A rebadged by Dell).
Though UDF formatting is typically used with rewriteable media (RW disks), Drag to Disk also works with “write once” media (as far as I know, the only UDF software that works with CDR’s). This allows you to use CDR’s with other applications (MS Word, Excel, etc) and save application files to a recordable disk without saving to your hard drive first and then moving the data to CD or DVD with software like Creator Classic.
Drag to Disc will optionally compress files as they are saved to disk, and will span files across more than one disk.
Photosuite 7
Early in 2002 Roxio bought out MGI Software adding Photosuite to their product lineup, now available as Photosuite 7 Platinum. While Easy CD Creator 6 included a subset of Roxio’s then current product PhotoSuite 5 Platinum, Media Creator 7 includes the complete Photosuite 7 Platinum feature set (also sold separately, $50 MSRP). According Roxio, Easy Media Creator 7 includes the full capabilities of Roxio's newest versions of VideoWave and PhotoSuite—VideoWave 7 Professional and PhotoSuite 7 Platinum.
Photosuite offers most of the editing tools that are included with entry level photo editing programs, as well as a few, like Photostitch, that are missing from many programs. Though I liked the version of Photosuite included with Easy CD Creator 6, I think most users will be more pleased with the new features included here.
-Overall quality editing (saturation, exposure, tint, sharpness). There’s an autofix option here which lets Photosuite chose the best settings for your image. I’m a very casual photographer, and generally find that the autofix option does as good or better job than I can manually in many cases. But occasionally it makes inappropriate “improvements”, say you’ve taken a nice sunset shot of an interesting horizon, where autofix will brighten the picture so much it will appear to be taken at late afternoon instead of sunset.
- Facial flaws (red eye, blemish and wrinkle removal), all of which are easy to use and effective, just zoom in to the area you want to touch up, and remove red eye or a wrinkle just like you were painting over it.
-Damaged photo’s (for dust and scratch removal, and there’s a clone tool you can use to copy from one area to another) Recently I wanted to “remove” the date stamp from some digital images, and I did this by cloning the space next to the date stamp in the corner of my images and using that to cover the date stamp. Quick and easy.
-crop, flip, rotate, resize, and straighten adjustments
-dust and scratch removal tools Like the red eye removal tool, you zoom in on small flaws and use the scratch tool to “remove” any small flaws in images by blending the flaw into its surroundings on the image. The dust removal tool works on the complete image, but I’ve not had reason to use this yet.
One of the new Photosuite features included with MC7 is Photostitch. Photostitch will combine several photo’s with common borders and overlapping areas into one panoramic view. I recently went on a Louisiana bayou tour, and was able to take several photo’s overlooking the bayou at sunset. I took three images of a sunset view, taken at dusk, and Photostitch combined the images together seemingly perfectly into one panoramic view.
Photosuite will also add one of three types of borders to images, “frame”, “mat”, and ”edge”. Edge provides 44 different edge borders, different types of blur’s, tears, paint brush strokes, and several others. After choosing a type of edge, you can choose from one of about 75 different colors and designs (weaves, simulated concrete or cork, etc). There are similar variations for the frame and mat options, providing literally hundreds of ways to frame your images.
Capture
Capturing video with Roxio's Capture software works well. Plugging the my Sony TRV 22 miniDV camcorder into the firewire port on my PC launches the capture window. This window offers several options, in my case, capture from the ATI TV Tuner in my PC (an All in Wonder card), capture from my scanner, audio inputs on my PC, from files on my hard disk, or my Sony DV camcorder. Capturing video from the camcorder is very intuitive, select Manual or Smartscan mode, select whether to capture to DV-AVI files or compressed video (MPEG2) and press the start capture button. DV-avi files require about 200MB of diskspace per minute of video. The MPEG 2 versions only required about 70MB per minute of video, with no noticeable drop in quality. But each time you reencode video, there is some loss in quality, so I prefer to capture in the DV-avi format, do my edits on that file, and then encode to MPG or MPEG2 files.
SmartScan mode works well, and makes transferring video from tape to your PC a little easier. I recently recorded several individual performances at a school dance recital, stopping and starting the camera for each performance. I let SmartScan scan the tape in my camcorder, and in a couple of minutes it had identified several video clips on the tape, one for each time I had started taping a performance. I then selected 3 of those recordings from the thumbnail preview provided in the capture workspace, and let the capture program rewound or fast forwarded the videocam as needed to capture those three selections, with no input from me.
Videowave 7
EMC7 also includes Videowave, Roxio’s latest video authoring/editing package, including all the functionality of their standalone product, Videowave 7 Professional. Videowave offers tools for capturing, editing/authoring, and encoding video.
Editing your video is a bit more complicated than capturing, as you might expect from a program that provides as much control as this one. I recently recorded a talent show that my daughter performed in. After transferring the video to my PC using the Videowave capture tool, I edited as follows:
1. Trimmed the beginning and end of the recording to eliminate unwanted portions of what I recorded. I also split the video into parts, one for each act, and eliminated the dead time between acts. Each clip was added to the Videowave Storyboard. The Storyboard production area offers two views. The linear storyline view shows each clip and transition as it is added to the video project. A timeline view that shows separate tracks for video, audio, narration, effects and text below a detailed time scale, that can be edited separately.
2. For each portion, I was able to add text introducing each person, one at time. I could choose from a lot different fonts and styles, and “scroll”, “fade”, or “fly” in each name, from top or the sides of the screen, and then leave or fade out at a point I chose.
3. Similarly I added credits at the end of each clip
4. I added transitions between clips. EMC7 provides more than 150 to chose from! Some are quite attention getting, like one where the screen shrinks to down to one side of a coin, which flips, and then expands back to full screen with the new clip.
You can also add narration or background sound tracks to the video. When you’re finished, you can output your video to several types of customizable video formats, including MPG, MPEG1, DivX, VCD/SVCD, and WMV (Windows Media Video), or send the output to EMC7’s DVD authoring software, DVD Builder. The encoder reasonably fast on my 2.66GHZ Dell system running Win XP with 768mb ram, requiring about 1 minute real time for encoding each minute’s worth of DV avi video to VCD compliant MPG files, for example.
If you want help creating video projects, Videowave offers a couple of template/options built around several common themes. Cinemagic connects video and audio clips, adjusting the order, timing, effects, and transitions to fit with one of several themes, and can create some unusual and interesting projects, which might be appreciated by teenagers, but not their grandparents. Storybuilder connects videos in the order you choose, using more conventoinal intro's and transitions, perhaps making your projects more professional looking (but a less fun to put together).
For comparison, I tried encoding a 4.5 minute clip of DV video to a VCD compliant mpg file with Videowave and TMPGEnc (everyone’s favorite freeware mpg encoder). Both products encoded the video is almost the same amount time, 4 minutes and 25 seconds, give or take a couple of seconds. My opinion was that the quality of the TMPGEnc video was slightly better than Videowave encode, but the difference was small. (Of course, comparing TMPGEnc to Videowave is not really appropriate, it is not a video editor, only encodes, though it does that quite well.). I’ve encoded several projects with Videowave, and I’ve had no A/V sync problems converting DV-avi files to mpg, DivX, or MPEG2 files.
DVD Builder
Like Creator Classic, DVD Builder is another one of the cornerstones of EMC7. DVD builder allows you to layout your DVD, add title screens and menu’s to your DVD, add clips to a DVD and assign those clips to chapter buttons on your menu’s. DVD Builder works pretty much seamlessly with Videowave, and both applications provide a very consistent look and feel. The DVD Builder work area is very intuitive, with the work options listed on the left (add video, add transitions, etc), a view of the menu screen or video you are developing on the right, and a timeline display of all the video clips and transitions between those clips on the bottom.
DVD Builder offers 4 compression settings when it converts your video files to DVD, Best, Good, Medium, and Low. The first three are 720 X 480 resolution at 9, 8, and 7 mbps data rates, and Low is a 352 X 240 setting with a 4mbs data rate. At the best setting, a DVD will hold about 64 minutes of video, at low, you can fit about 2 hours and 20 minutes on a DVD.
DVD Builder offers quite a few options to help you lay out your DVD to best suite your needs. Options available on the DVD layout screen include, the ability to “drag around” and resize menu buttons on your DVD menus to best suite your tastes, have an intro video before the main menu. There are plenty of options for transitions between chapters, and you can make minor edits as clips as you add them to DVD builder, or launch Videowave to perform advanced editing. Before burning, DVD Builder offers a preview window to preview your DVD, try out chapter links, listen to background audio, etc. DVD Builder works well, but its real strength are the close links to Videowave and other tools included in EMC7.
DVD Builder can also be used to create Video CD’s (VCD’s) and Super Video CD’s (SVCD’s). Creating VCD’s from DV-avi files captured with my video camera well. SVCD’s look very good, though not quite as good as DVD’s. VCD’s look ok full screen, but the images aren’t nearly as sharp when played back on a TV or computer. One weakness in DVD builder is that insists on re-encoding files added to VCD’s or SVCD’s, even if no edits are performed. I’ve found a few long (over 40 minutes) VCD compliant video files that are transcoded by DVD Builder lose A/V sync. Video quality drops slightly with each reencode. To minimize these problems, I’d like to see DVD Builder provide the option to force DVD Builder not to transcode VCD compliant video files when creating VCD’s, SVCD’s or DVD’s. The last update to EMC7 added let DVD Builder add DVD compliant video files without transcoding, so I hope the next update expands that feature to include VCD and SVCD compliant mpg files.
Audio Applications
EMC7 includes Sound Editor and Napster 2.0. Napster 2.0 (actually 2.5 now) is Roxio’s music download service offering downloads of over a half million singles and albums, typically for 99 cents per track or $10 per album. The Napster software can also be used to scan and organize audio software on your harddrive, create playlists, rip tunes to wma or mp3 format (but you’ll need Creator Classic to create ogg vorbis files), edit track information, and burn audio cd’s. Napster is more intuitive than Windows Media Player, and, since its its focused solely on being an audio player, easier to use than Windows Media Player.
Roxio seems to have de-emphasized the sound editing features of this digital media suite, at least in their ads. Previous version have touted the ability to convert lp’s and cassette tapes to digital files, and you can still do that with Sound Editor. (Perhaps there’s less interest in that feature now than there was a few years ago.) Sound Editor,a wave form editor, allows you to capture and edit analog audio tracks with ease, and convert them to digital format. Some of the effects you can apply to your audio tracks include: fade in/out, reverse playback, normalize volume of multiple tracks, equalizer adjustment, declick, dehiss and other options for “fixing” old recordings, and a few other fun special effects, like “robotizer” and “room” effects (box, church, etc). I've used older versions of Easy CD Creator to convert many of my old lp's to music cd's, and find that Roxio's software makes doing this easy, and the audio quality is very good.
Support and Documentation
Online techinical support on the Roxio website is extensive. Roxio hosts a very active usergroup on their website, and Roxio support personel are active in the group. The video tutorials, help files, and pdf user guides for each application, which are included with the software, are effective and easy to use. Email support, online FAQ's, and an automated answer system are also available. Phone support is available for $35.00/incident.
Includes PhotoSuite 7, VideoWave 7, Napster 2.0, and Easy CD & DVD Creator Organize with Media Manager; password-protect and encrypt private data Tran...More at Amazon Marketplace
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