Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 10

I thought I hit the jackpot when I got ver.9. Having photo, video, and audio programs for a song of a price made me content. 10 added device support and a few more things. By far though I look at 10 as my device manager and have uninstalled the weaker individual device programs. I take lots of pics and a few vids on my cellphone and would like to keep them Instead of paying for internet email I send them to my pc by bluetooth. This is free and gives me the opportunity to edit the photos and videos. It works vice versa, it sends media to the phone. I can set the defaults for my phone so I don't have to keep resizing the specs. Another thing added from 9 is tracking cd/dvd content. I don't have to look at each disk to see what it contains. There are still the great editing programs only with a few more upgrades.

. . . but I did this time. I honestly can't remember the last time I gave up on a piece of software I really wanted to use, but this one beat me.

I even went to the trouble of making a *second* clean install (a clean reinstall is about the only piece of advice regarding trying to make this package work I could get from Roxio's support for EMC 10; even that was gleaned from the forum--my emails went unanswered.).

I should have paid attention to the reports here and not wasted my time with EMC10, but there's no doubt you lucky folks who have it working have a nice software suite. There's plenty of folks having no-run problems with this over at the Roxio forums, too.

I still have XP, so maybe those of you running Vista might have better luck. I wish anyone buying EMC10 luck, but don't be surprised if you end up wasting eight hours or more like I did.

Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 10

PC magazine calls this the best DVD Authoring software. It is. It does the most formats and makes it easy to make any kind of DVD you want. it also has very good but not great( I come from being a professional sound editor) Sound and Video editing for amatuer. Great product.

I can't say enough of how easy this program is. I learned a lot about photo editing from using verison 9. It gave me the confidence to try more. I bought an hd camcorder and the deluxe version for the tape converter. I don't need the converter for the camcorder but I figured I could now deal with the backlog of tapes. Anyway it only takes hooking up the camcorder to my pc and version 10 does a lot of steps. I've stuck with Cinemagic so It will make smaller clips automatically. It makes it easy to delete what I don't want and sort the clips. It makes HD dvds so I can keep the high quality visuals. My old tapes are s-video and the converter has this connection. It's not hd but it's better than regular vhs video. The video snapshot tool takes photos from the video clips. I can enhance them and not only use them for photo projects but they can be inserted into dvd menus. I did notice that the there are more menu, album, and slideshow templates in 10 than in 9. I'll be changing my phone soon so I will get a video player one since 10 can transfer video onto it. There are many other programs but I use it mostly for photos and videos and like the programs.

I found the product to be useful and very friendly. Quick summary on my findings.

- video: 2 programs, cinemagic is very user friendly and quick but missing some more advanced features; videowave is more complete with layering of effects; includes soundtracks, special effects, subtitles

- photo: photosuite is much like other programs but it is a complete photo editor; photo projects include the usual slideshow, albums, collages; all are easy to use

- music: very basic sound editor but anyone can use it; has fading, hissing sound removal, volume adjuster; creates playlists from song data and will insert data automatically with an online database; can transfer playlists along with songs to ipod

- disk authoring: basic steps are about the same as version 8 but more formats such as blue-ray, HD included, can now rip several disks at once, can burn several disks at once; label and menu creation have lots of styles

Unusual programs include internet audio grabber, tivo and ipod editing. All in all I found many useful programs which are all user friendly.