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Roxio Creator Review
- Full Version: $99.99
- $20 mail in rebate available on purchase
- Blu-Ray/Hi-Def plugin: $29.99
- Integrated suite for creating movies, audio playlists, slideshows and copying DVDs
- Easy to use with lots of different functionality
- Create smooth party mixes with automatic beat matching
- Automatically create fun video stories from your photos, videos and music
- Easily add great looking effects like picture-in-picture video
- Create great looking slideshows with an automatically added soundtrack
- Organise your photos and enhance them with a range of tools
- Copy a dual layer DVD to a single layer DVD
- Create virtual disc drives and load disc images
- Schedule unattended backups to disc
- Import video from a variety of different sources
- Burn up to 60 minutes of high definition video to a standard DVD
- Automatically enhance video contrast and color
- Burn movies to Blu-Ray disc (with optional plugin)
- Author DVDs with professional looking titles and menus
- Rip music from CDs or other sources to create playlists with audio effects
- Quickly and easily upload to YouTube
- Send playlists and videos to your mobile device
- Create professional looking CD and DVD labels
- Share your photos and video online with your personal Roxio web page
- Compatible with Windows only
Roxio Creator is not just a video editing tool, but rather a whole suite of different tools for various media creating tasks bundled into one application. While, at times, the application risks being a jack of all trades, master of none, the variety of tasks it can perform outweighs the fact that none of them go into too much depth. This is an ideal application for anyone who doesn't need to go into any great depth in the functions that Roxio Creator performs and wants everything neatly bundled together in one package.
In the past Roxio's products have been criticised for having below par user interfaces that have been a bit fiddly to use. The latest version, however, has addressed this and when you open the application you are presented with an eye-catching welcome screen with easy to understand icons for each of the tasks that Roxio Creator performs. Some of the more simple tasks, like copying a DVD, run in the home window and can be achieved with just a few clicks, while more complex tasks, like video editing launch in their own window to provide more control.
Roxio Creator performs quite an impressive number of different tasks which would normally require you to purchase a different standalone application to perform each one. We could ramble on for a long time about each one, but, as a brief overview, it can edit video, create photo slideshows, schedule backups to disc, copy CDs and DVDs, create music playlists, author DVDs, create labels for your creations and share your media online. There are even probably things we have missed from that list so great is the number of tasks Roxio Creator can perform. It is important to note though, that while having all these things together is great for people who don't want to get too deep into any one particular task, it does mean that you don't get the amount of control and depth that you would get if you purchased standalone applications to do each one.
Most relevant to the category where we are reviewing Roxio Creator is its video editing capabilities. As we have hinted it doesn't offer quite the functionality that some of the standalone applications offer, but it still works pretty well as a basic editing suite. You can easily edit video clips together with a range of scene transition effects and even achieve more complex picture-in-picture effects without too much trouble. The standard version supports a wide variety of file formats, but doesn't allow you to work with high definition content. To work with AVCHD footage and burn to Blu-Ray discs you must purchase the downloadable plug-in at extra cost. However, a very handy feature of it is that you can burn up to 60 minutes of HD footage to a standard DVD which can be played in any Blu-Ray player.
Roxio Creator is an excellent piece of software for anyone to have on their computer as it can perform so many different tasks and is very easy to dip in and out of. However, if you are serious about video editing and are prepared to spend a bit of time learning the ropes, then you would probably be better off going for a standalone video editing application - of which there are some great examples in the rest of our top ten. However, if you just want something that will get the job done easily, and a number of other jobs besides, then Roxio Creator is an excellent value piece of software.
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