Roxio Easy Media Creator 8 Suite review

Creating your own CDs and DVDs is often made to sound boring - as if all you could do was backup important files and other dull, but worthy, tasks.

It doesn't have to be like this and with the right software, you can do lots of fun and interesting things with your DVD or CD burner.

Creator can create your own movie discs, turn your old vinyl LPs into CDs and make photo discs that will play in a normal DVD player. Getting lots of different pieces of software to do all these things will, however, cost you a bomb. That's where Roxio's Creator comes in - originally just a CD burning program it can do everything we mentioned above and more.

New to the suite in version 8 is Sonic MyDVD. This is much more accomplished than the DVD authoring facilities included with previous versions of Creator, with more control over the layout and structure of menus. You also get a simplified version of the program MyDVD Express, which reduces the authoring process to a set of simple walkthrough steps. This is great if you want to create DVD movie discs, but don't want to go get involved in the nitty gritty of disc authoring.

VideoWave is Roxio's long-established video-editing software and although we wouldn't recommend it for budding enthusiasts, those who just want to run a few clips together from their digital camera or to cut out the dross from camcorder footage will find it perfectly capable. As with Nero's video-editing tools, we were surprised to find support for HD cameras and footage. There still seems to be a few creases to iron out, though - there's no export template for the HDV format used by Sony's almost-affordable HDR-HC1 camera, for example. We occasionally experienced loss of audio sync in exported videos, even though playback on the timeline was fine.

One of the best things about Creator is how closely all the programs in the suite work together. It's accessed through the launch utility. If you know which program you want to use, you can get to it through the launcher. If you're not sure which program you need, simply click on the option for the job you want to do, for instance, creating a file backup or editing a video, and the launcher automatically starts the right program for you. All the programs look and feel the same, so you very quickly get used to how the suite works. This is a big improvement over previous version and over some of its competitors, in which all the programs work differently and don't fit well together.

We're also big fans of the Media Manager, which organises music, photo and video files by various categories for quick browsing. The ability to browse huge photo collections by capture date is really useful, and best of all is that the thumbnails are quick to update and resize if you want to fit more on-screen or see them up close.

Ultimately, it's the number of things you can do with it that makes Easy Media Creator such a great package. We soon found ourselves doing things we hadn't even thought of trying before, such as creating a calendar based on holiday snaps, or turning MP3 collections into attractively presented DVD Video discs for convenient playback in the living room. Rival suite Nero 7 Premium has even more programs, including ones for Windows Media Center-style media playback and music production, but Easy Media Creator is more comprehensive in terms of its photo and video-based creative projects. These are the things that DVD writers arre really good for. As it's also the more polished of the two, it gets our top award.

Author: Ben Pitt