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By Stephen F. Nathans
Synopsis: Never has a
consumer product in the digital media space packed so much power
and versatility and made it so easy to get to. For application
triage,
Creator 7
has no peer. Choose an app by name, or from a
handy task list, and you're sure to find what you're looking
for, be it video or photo editing, disc copying, CD or DVD
burning, or DVD authoring. With the exception of the (still)
disappointingly limited DVD Builder, they are all fine tools,
and there are logical (and usually multiple) ways to navigate
between them. What's more, it's got a mind-boggling price: it's
hard to argue with a suite jam-packed with top-notch apps for
$99.
The talk of the baseball world in February was the
New York Yankees' controversial signing of Alex Rodriguez.
Laughing in the face of the luxury tax, and showing up the Red
Sox' John Henry and every other multimillionaire owner without
the guts to blast through a mountain to bolster his lineup,
George Steinbrenner added an all-time great at the peak of his
powers—playing and earning—to a team already loaded with pricey,
overpowering talent.
Which leaves the rest of the league
to fume and fret over a season many have pronounced over before
it's begun. How do you beat a team with All-Stars at eight
positions, and MVPs at three?
Naturally, journalists are
doing their best to poke holes in these intimations of
invincibility: A-Rod is out of position at 3rd base, and Jeter
has always been out of position at shortstop; Giambi, Lofton,
Brown, and Rivera aren't what they used to be; all those
all-star egos can't possibly co-exist. Faced with such a team,
writers will repeat these arguments until they believe them. But
they know they're grasping at straws.
When Roxio's Chris
Taylor and Vito Salvaggio flew out to Madison in late January to
demo
Easy Media Creator 7, scanning the new Media Creator
Home Explorer interface that catalogs all the applications in
the new "Digital Media Suite" was enough to make my eyes bug out
the way a glance at the new Yankee lineup does. Just as
Rodriguez, Jeter, Sheffield, Lofton, Giambi, Matsui, Mussina, or
Brown might be (or have been) franchise players on another
ballclub, Creator Classic, VideoWave, and PhotoSuite are all
viable products in their own right that have been rolled into
Creator 7 with their full feature sets intact. VideoWave, for
example, acquired from MGI in 2002, sells as a standalone
product for $79, and competes in the consumer NLE space with
Ulead Video Studio, Pinnacle Studio 9, and ArcSoft ShowBiz.
PhotoSuite, a still-image tool newly beefed-up with enticing
masking and object selection features, sells on its own for
$49.95. And Creator Classic and CD & DVD Creator ship in OEM
versions with all manner of CD and DVD recorders and
recorder-equipped PCs and often prove to be the only recording
tools that purchasers of those drives and PCs ever use.
Never has a consumer product in this space packed so much power
and versatility and made it so easy to get to. Which is a key
point in and of itself: for application triage, Creator 7 has no
peer. Choose an app by name, or from a handy task list, and
you're sure to find what you're looking for. With the exception
of the (still) disappointingly limited DVD Builder, they are all
fine tools, and there are always logical (and usually multiple)
ways to navigate between them.
What's more, if it took a
Yankees-sized payroll to put these elements together, Roxio
certainly hasn't passed those costs on to the user. It's hard to
argue with a suite jam-packed with top-notch apps for $99.
Home Base
Like any consumer tool vendor, Roxio makes
some basic assumptions about its customers. They make two, in
particular about entry-level digital media users: one, that they
want digital video editing, digital photo and other asset
management, DVD authoring, slideshows, audio CD recording, data
backup, and CD and DVD copying in a single tool; and two, that
they know and like Windows and its way of navigating from task
to task. They've assumed correctly on both counts, and what's
more, the way they've implemented those assumptions by combining
VideoWave, PhotoSuite, DVD Builder, and Creator Classic and
inviting users to access them through the pleasing and
purposeful "Media Creator Home" interface couldn't be better. If
we gave grades in EMedia, I'd give the Creator Home page an A+.
If you know the app you want, select it by name (VideoWave,
Creator Classic, etc.), or choose the task you want from one of
five categories (Music, Data, Photo, Video, DVD), with choices
related to the kind of disc you want to make or what sort of
machinations you wish to perform on your video or photo assets.
It's a great way to get started.
Digging In
In
this entry-level division of the digital studio, what we're most
interested in doing with a product like
Creator 7 is pulling in various media assets, editing
and assembling them, and authoring the results to DVD. The first
project I undertook in testing Creator 7 involved capturing
roughly 28 minutes of video, importing it into VideoWave, and
editing it by splitting some scenes, trimming some clips, adding
some transitions and effects, placing overlay titles at
opportune points, mixing in some background audio, and
assembling a music video from those captured clips with a
feature called CineMagic.
Capture was painless and
seamless. You can go straight to Capture Video from the Task
List, and the Roxio Capture module will present you with a "My
Computer"-style list of potential capture devices. Among them
are DVD movie files from hard disk and DVD movie files from DVD;
Creator 7 can unpack non copy-protected VOBs and import them
into its Collections media asset bins as MPEG-2 files, which is
an interesting feature. You can also rip digital audio tracks
into WAV files and record from analog sources in this window,
and it's a well-reasoned place to combine all these tasks. What
we're interested in here is digital video and photos from their
original sources, and when I connected my two capture devices of
choice—a JVC MiniDV camera and a Kodak DX3700 digital still
camera—both showed up immediately.
I captured the video
without dropping a frame, even living dangerously by working in
Internet Explorer and Outlook Express during the capture process
(don't you try that at home). Like most entry-level NLEs,
Creator 7 can capture an entire tape, selected scenes, or a
user-set chunk of video (say, 15 minutes, 30 seconds). It can
also detect scenes on the fly or after you import your video
into a collection and open it in VideoWave. When you're done
capturing, there are lots of places you can go—VideoWave, DVD
Builder, PhotoSuite 7, etc.—and Creator makes it easy to get
there.
Upon arrival in VideoWave, I imported my file from
the capture folder into Collections. Immediately, my project
presented a problem that wasn't VideoWave's fault: because I'd
stopped, rewound, and watched portions of the tape as I added
footage to it over 2-3 weeks, and been careless about leaving
space on the tape between video shot at different times, my
timecode information was invalid, which meant no automatic scene
detection. (You can avoid this problem prior to shooting and
capture by shooting an entire new tape with the lens cap on,
then rewinding and starting fresh. Subsequently, no matter what
you do with the tape after that, the timecode information will
be constant and complete when you bring the footage to your PC.)
Left with 28 minutes of undifferentiated video, I had to
chop up the scenes myself, which is accomplished pretty easily
in the video editor after switching from the Storyline to the
Timeline view. Slide over to the point in the video where you
want a scene break, right click, and select Split from the
pull-down, or use the Split-Media Item button from the helpful
icon panel above the timeline. There are several other
interesting things you can do here. You can add inter-scene
transitions from an enormous (though not particularly
well-organized) array of choices ranging from simple dissolves,
fades, and wipes to very funky and creative 3D stuff with blocks
and shapes and a whole set of SMPTE Wipes. Eyeballing it, I'd
say you get more here than you do in the non-premium level of
Pinnacle Studio, the standard-setter in the entry-level NLE
category.
You can also trim your clips in VideoWave, as
you might expect; all the trimming is accomplished under the
Adjust Duration/Video Trimmer heading, most easily accessed by
clicking the clock icon. Here, the rolling dial option is
particularly appealing as an alternative to the familiar
scrubber/slider. I still prefer Ulead's Multitrim (from
MovieFactory 3), but the VideoWave version gets the job done.
You can also add title overlays, ranging from the simple and
straightforward to the flying and bouncing sort; they get their
own "abc" track in the Timeline, which is nicely differentiated
from the video, audio, and effects tracks. VideoWave also offers
overlays like filmstrip and old photo, and video effects like
sepia, tints, mirrors, and swirls for those whose tastes run
that way (the search lights are pretty cool), although no color
correction or cleaning. (Roxio product management VP Salvaggio
says their users don't want that stuff. I say they fall behind
Studio 9 by its omission.)
You can also insert additional
audio tracks and balance their volume with the original audio
from the video (all the way up to wiping it out). All of these
tasks are intuitive, effective, and easily performed.
Also of some interest here are the "automatic" video editors
CineMagic and StoryBuilder, on loan from VideoWave's
MovieCreator spinoff. I liked those tools when I reviewed
MovieCreator in December 2002, and I still enjoy 'em now.
MovieCreator helped define a new class of "automatic" video
editors a comfy step down from tools like VideoStudio and
Studio, and even ShowBiz. Including its key components here
helps Roxio meet several levels of user needs and wants.
Motion Pictures
One VideoWave pull-down I find
particularly appealing is a small, hodge-podge icon just above
the timeline containing a butterfly, a filmstrip, and a pencil.
Click it, and you'll be presented with four choices of editors:
Adjust, Edit native audio, Motion Pictures, and Edit internal
tracks.
Adjust offers very basic color adjustment
controls: brightness, contrast, and sliders for
increasing/decreasing your reds, greens, and blues. You can also
change the speed of the video here. This degree of color
adjustment used to meet expectations for entry-level NLEs, but
not since Pinnacle raised the color correction and video noise
reduction bar in Studio 9.
Edit native audio opens a
window in which you can change the overall volume of a clip's
native audio, set edit points to amplify or decrease it, and
adjust it by frequency range using a simple or advanced
equalizer. I like that you can cross-fade and mix tracks within
the timeline with impunity in Studio, but the equalizer is a
nice bonus in VideoWave.
Edit internal tracks lets you focus on the currently selected
scene in the timeline or storyline; double clicking it achieves
the same result.
Motion Pictures is where VideoWave
really stands apart from the crowd. Motion Pictures opens up
your selected scene in a new window where you can perform
pan-and-scan functions on the video. Using a combination of
slider bar and click-and-drag frame adjustment, you can select
different frame sizes and positions for the portion of the
screen you want to show, and keyframe the points in the video
timeline when you want to move the frame. Naturally, this also
works on still images. Minus the vectors, 3D, and complexity,
this is essentially what programs like Imaginate and
MovingPicture do for still images; to apply these moves to
motion video on the other hand, you usually have to move up to
mid-level NLEs (like Premiere, Edition, Vegas, and MSP). You can
do it with still photos in Studio 9's 2D Editor, but it's much
easier to get results in Motion Pictures. It's not exactly a
must-buy differentiator for a consumer tool, but it's
nonetheless a nice distinguishing feature for Roxio to include
here.
Photo Finishing
Which brings me to my
favorite feature of all in the entire Creator 7 suite. As in
MyDVD, Studio, MovieCreator, and all the other entry-level
products that offer basic video tools and DVD authoring, Creator
7 has slideshow capabilities. As much as I enjoy the way Creator
7 enables you to capture still images and organize them into
collections, and as logical as I find it that it lets you rip
and import music tracks to accompany your slideshows at the same
time and place, it's what Creator 7 lets you do with slideshows
that really sets it apart.
Working in VideoWave, import
your still images (including screens you may have grabbed from
your video clips) into collections and drag the ones you want
into the storyboard. Add transitions manually or automatically
(Transition Themes are helpful here), and click the musical note
icon to add an audio track (interestingly, VideoWave won't
import a protected WMA track downloaded from their own Napster
service). Click the Fit to Audio icon to sync up the times.
Rotate your photos as needed for those that came in sideways.
(Roxio will place black bars around photos, rotated or
otherwise, that don't fit a 4:3 screen.) Nothing unfamiliar
here. Then click select all, right-click on any image, and
select Auto Motion from the menu that pops up.
Instantly,
mirabile visu, VideoWave adds one of six preset pan-and-zoom
moves (applied at random) to each image to create motion
throughout your slideshow. With the growing popularity of
pan-and-zoom tools like Imaginate and MovingPicture, and with
MovingPicture appearing as an add-on to more and more tools,
most recently Studio 9, there's definitely a lot of interest in
applying documentary-style, frame-shifting motion to still
images, but it's a laborious process, meant for careful
application to individual or small groups of images, synched to
narration and so forth. By automating it, Roxio actually
presents image panning to consumers in a digestible way. This
approach should also appeal to wedding videographers and digital
photographers and anyone working with CD/DVD slideshows who want
to give their productions an edge without interrupting their
workflow.
The inclusion of PhotoSuite in the Creator
suite also gives users additional photo-editing capabilities you
don't find in other consumer NLEs. Let's say you need to rotate
vertical photos and the rotation leaves you with black bars at
the sides. Right click on the photo, select Edit from the pop-up
menu, and you'll jump to a screen where you can crop, change the
proportions numerically, or click and drag a bounding box until
your image stretches to fit the screen. Pro-level photo
management products like Ulead PhotoImpact have excellent tools
for this kind of thing, but until now, editors have had to
venture outside of their NLE to get their photos in shape.
DVD Building
I've spent most of this review
talking about VideoWave for two reasons, one good, the other
bad. First, the good: Creator Classic, the disc recording
engine, is still best-in-show as ever: a wonderful, versatile
product enhanced by its association with the Explorer-like task
and applications lists, the new colors of the interface, and the
fact that it hasn't been "skinned" like too many tools in this
MP3 player-aestheticized age. Like the DVD authoring interface
in Sonic's MyDVD, Creator Classic is untouchable as an
all-purpose CD/DVD recording tool.
The other key
component I've yet to address here (the bad, unfortunately) is
DVD Builder. Not only is it still not up to the Sonic standard,
but it remains the most feature-deprived authoring tool I've
seen (well, let's say it's in a tie with Nero on that count). If
Nero were the only competing suite that offered general-purpose
recording as well, I'd let it slide, but Sonic and Ulead are
also playing that all-things-to-all-people game now, and their
authoring tools are much more intuitive and versatile; they
offer more templates; and they're better integrated with the
admittedly limited editing interfaces in their current product
suites.
I imported a 24-minute, five-scene video project
into DVD Builder by clicking the DVD icon above the timeline. I
marked chapters at selected scene changes using a slider bar,
and instructed DVD Builder to create a chapter menu, at a level
below the title menu. I then added a second title, an Auto
Motion slideshow, which also could have been an additional
chapter from the first title if I'd placed it in the timeline.
All well and good—even with the limited template choices and
relatively simple moving and sizing of the chapter
buttons—except I could find only one way to edit the chapter
sub-menu, and an unsatisfactory one at that. You can create a
chapter menu template with a photo or video background of your
choice, select text color and font, and rows or columns, but
that's it. No re-sizing, rearrangement, or chapter titling.
There's a pulldown for menu editing, but it only applies to
intro video and title menus. You get much more control—including
chapters as the first menu—in other entry-level authoring tools,
which makes this a serious omission from DVD Builder. For my
five chapters, I got five small icons with numbers underneath
them. They were way too small, and inefficient in their use of
menu real estate (a small horizontal stripe halfway down the
screen). You're better off setting chapter points for
in-playback navigation but omitting the chapter menu, if that
approach suits your project.
DVD Builder rendered the
video and effects quickly and effectively, and several discs
burned fine, with the software writing flawlessly to Verbatim
DVD+R and DVD-R media (both from DVD Builder and later in DVD
copying tests), as well as some Verbatim CD-R discs in audio CD
burning and duping. Following the DVD burn, my Auto Motion slide
show sputtered on playback on a Pioneer DVD player, but played
flawlessly on the PC. It turned out to be an AC-3 audio encoding
problem, which Roxio has now identified and fixed.
Roxio's integration continues to shine here—you can get back to
VideoWave by clicking Advanced Edit, as well as get back to the
Media Selector and Capture and add transitions in your video or
slideshow—which is nice, since many users who are all about
getting video onto DVD will start here and enter applications
only as needed.
And if we pull back a step and look at
the bigger picture, thinking of DVD authoring and video editing
as integrated activities, rather than effectively linked
discrete applications—the goal, again, being an intelligent and
seamless process—I still lean toward Pinnacle's approach of
offering menu linking in the timeline. I understand that Roxio
believes that many of its users who want to make DVDs don't ever
want to know about timelines. But that's no reason not to build
that capability into VideoWave, if they truly want it to feed
DVD authoring projects. There's versatility, power, and control
in that approach you can't get elsewhere, and I believe any
entry-level editor/author, like me, will always prefer the work
they do in Studio, at least in terms of the mechanics of the DVD
they create and its effective presentation of the video they've
captured and edited.
Choosing Sides
Creator 7 doesn't integrate video editing and authoring
as well as Studio 9, but it's not an apples-to-apples
comparison, since Creator 7 integrates much more than video
editing and authoring. (In that sense it's more aptly compared
to Apple's iLife 4, but lacking a common platform those two
obviously don't compete.) Outside of DVD menu creation, Creator
7 offers much more than the Editor's Choice-winning MyDVD 5
Studio Deluxe—Creator Classic beats the shrunken RecordNow,
VideoWave offers much more video editing flexibility, there's
simply no contest on the photo features (big win for Roxio),
disc copying is a push, and MyDVD's opening-screen wizard isn't
the omnipotent ombudsman that the Creator Home page is.
But we put a lot of emphasis on DVD authoring in these parts,
and if you direct all these wonderful elements toward the final
step of DVD authoring and you end up with a disc that's clumsy
to navigate and not as structurally elegant as it can or should
be, that diminishes the value of what you built along the way.
And I'm not saying you can't make a good or great DVD from all
the sophisticated media management, editing, and compiling you
can do in Creator 7, but MyDVD will make a better DVD of the
same project, and ultimately that counts for a lot.
Nobody's got a lineup anywhere near as feature-rich as Creator
7, and despite the shortcomings of DVD Builder, the overall
effect is so overwhelming there's really nothing out there than
can compete. Roxio's got all-stars at positions the competition
doesn't even fill.
If your ambitions aren't DVD-centric,
or you can live with a little less elegance in your DVD
navigation, you'll never find a computing application that packs
as much punch, power, and breathtaking range of capabilities as
Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.
Roxio Easy Media Creator 7
www.roxio.com
System Requirements:
• Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 or XP SP1
• For CD burning and
copying: 500mHz Pentium 3, 128MB RAM
• For DVD slideshow or
video authoring: 1.2gHz Pentium 3, 256MB RAM
• For DVD-Video
copying: 4.5GB HDD space, 16-bit color graphics card
• For
real-time MPEG-2 capture/burning: 1.6gHz Pentium 3, 1GB free
hard disk space per 5 min. captured video
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