Easy Media Creator 8 Suite has spent 10 months in our Best Buy section, thanks to its comprehensive collection of disc-burning, media-cataloguing, editing and presenting software, wrapped up in a friendly interface. Version 9 is business as usual, but includes some welcome improvements to ensure that Creator stays ahead of its main rival, Nero.
Creator now supports Windows Vista and Blu-ray disc burning. There's no point in buying a Blu-ray drive yet as they're slow and expensive, and Vista is only available as a Beta version, but it's good to see Roxio keeping up-to-date with the latest technologies. It's a little surprising that HD-DVD is omitted, but we suspect that Roxio will address this before the drives become affordable.
The video-editing program, VideoWave, now supports up to 32 video tracks and includes automatic colour-correction and noise-reduction tools. These are welcome features, but the extra tracks aren't easy to manage and simple edits remain cumbersome. So despite improvements, VideoWave is best avoided. MyDVD, the authoring package, is more pleasant to use, and now includes a number of advanced options for how menu buttons look and behave. However, these features aren't easy to find or to use effectively. If you specifically want powerful video-editing and DVD-authoring tools, Sony Vegas Movie Studio costs the same and is vastly superior.
However, although some aspects of Creator aren't as slick or as powerful as we'd like, it's unfair to ask it to outperform dedicated video-editing programs at what they do best. Creator specialises in making its wide range of disc burning and authoring abilities easy to use and that's what makes it such a great package. The task-based approach actually makes it fun to work on a project, and even complete beginners will soon feel right at home.
REQUIRES Windows XP (SP2)/Vista, Pentium 2.4GHz and 512MB RAM for advanced features, 1GB disk spaceAs a low-cost introduction to a vast range of media-related tasks, Creator can't be beaten.Author: Ben Pitt
Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 Suite