Extreme Media Digital Studio review

Only two things limit the potential of your PC.

First is your imagination. Second is the software to make your ideas come true. The latter is where Extreme Media Digital Studio hopes to score. It's a one-stop shop for video, picture and sound editing. It'll introduce new ideas and provide software to help you carry them out.

The package doesn't provide one program for all these tasks, but five. These are linked together by a front screen that lets you jump between them, depending on what you'd like to create.

MGI's VideoWave 4 SE is provided for editing video. Version 5 is the latest, so bundling the previous one isn't so commendable. VideoWave also isn't the best beginner's editing program around (Ulead VideoStudio 6 is). Nevertheless, VideoWave 4 has a reasonable selection of transition and titling effects. It'll even support FireWire cards, which makes copying source video from a DV camera a doddle - provided your camera has the requisite connector. The software is also happy to work with a wide range of TV tuner cards, too - the cheapest way of getting video into your PC. VideoWave's biggest drawback is its interface, which is fine for beginners but constraining for more experienced users.

Photo editing is much more impressively handled by MGI's PhotoSuite 4 SE - the latest version. It offers a great wizard-based approach for managing and editing images. You can import pictures from a variety of sources, including a digital camera or scanner, and apply a selection of filters. An album tool lets you group images together the way you want.

Cakewalk Pyro 1.5 is another neat application. It's used for ripping music from CDs and analogue sources such as cassette tape, and converting it to WMA or MP3. These files are primarily for use with a portable music player. It is, however, more than capable of creating and managing a PC-based collection of MP3s. Pyro also lets you burn MP3s onto CDs. This way you can get around 10 albums on a single compact disc.

More CD burning fun can be had with NTI CD-Maker 2000 Plus. CD-Maker creates data and audio CDs, VideoCDs and Super VCDs. It also supports many drives' buffer under-run protection technologies, such as BURN-Proof and JustLink, as well as Overburn, for getting more than the quoted space out of a CD.

Last but not least is Broderbund's PrintShop CD Label Creator, a simple application for creating your own labels for cassettes, Zip and floppy disks, and CDs. Getting the most out of it requires you to obtain the appropriate-shaped sticky labels or paper, although you can get away with thin card for CD inlays.

Digital Studio is good value, considering the number and quality of the programs included. The problem is, if you're mainly after one or two of the functions, an up-to-date version of each program will have more features and probably cost less. As an introduction to the true power of your PC, though, this is a decent buy.